YOUR MIND AND HOW TO USE IT/PART 12
CHAPTER XII.
The Instinctive Emotions.
MANY
attempts to classify the emotions have been made by the psychologists, but the
best authorities hold that beyond the purpose of ordinary convenience in
considering the subject any classification is scientifically
useless by reason of its incompleteness. As James cleverly puts it: "Any
classification of the emotions is seen to be as true and as natural as any
other, if it only serves some purpose." The difficulty attending the attempted
classification arises from the fact that every emotion is more or less complex,
and is made up of various feelings and shades of emotional excitement. Each
emotion blends into others. Just as a few elements of matter may be grouped
into hundreds of thousands of combinations, so the elements of feeling may be
grouped into thousands of shades of emotion. It is said that the two elements
of carbon and hydrogen form combinations resulting in five thousand varieties
of material substance, "from anthracite to marsh gas, from black coke to
colorless naphtha." The same thing may be said of the emotional
combinations formed from two principal elements of feeling. Moreover, the
close distinction between sensation and feeling on the one hand, and between
feeling and emotion on the other, serves to further complicate the task.
For
the purposes of our consideration, let us divide the emotions into five general
classes, as follows: (1) Instinctive emotions, (2) social emotions, (3)
religious emotions, (4) æsthetic emotions, (5) intellectual emotions. We shall
now consider each of the above five classes in turn.
The
Instinctive Emotions.
Instinct
is defined as "unconscious, involuntary, or unreasoning prompting to any
action," or "the natural unreasoning impulse by which an animal is
guided to the performance of any action, without thought of improving the
method." An authority says: "Instinct is a natural impulse leading
animals, even prior to all experience, to perform certain actions tending to
the welfare of the individual or the perpetuation of the species, apparently
without understanding the object at which they may be supposed to aim, or
deliberating as to the best methods to employ. In many cases, as in the
construction of the cells of the bee, there is a perfection about the result
which reasoning man could not have equaled, except by an application of the
higher mathematics to direct the operations carried out. Mr. Darwin
considers that animals, in time past as now, have varied in their mental
qualities, and that those variations are inherited. Instincts also vary
slightly in a state of nature. This being so, natural selection can ultimately
bring them to a high degree of perfection."
It
was formerly the fashion to ascribe instinct in the lower animals, and in man,
to something akin to "innate ideas" implanted in each species and
thereafter continued by inheritance. But the application of the idea of
evolution to the science of psychology has resulted in brushing away these old
ideas. To-day it holds that that which we call "instinct" is the
result of gradual development in the course of evolution, the accumulated
experience of the race being stored away in the race memory, each individual
adding a little thereto by his acquired habits and experiences. Psychologists
now hold that the lower forms of these race tendencies are closely akin to
purely reflex actions, and the higher forms, which are known as
"instinctive emotions," are phenomena of the subconscious mind
resulting from race memory and race experience.
Clodd
says: "Instinct is the higher form of reflex action. The salmon migrates
from sea to river; the bird makes its nest or migrates from one zone to another
by an unvarying route, even leaving its young behind to perish; the bee
builds its six-sided cell; the spider spins its web; the chick breaks its way
through the shell, balances itself, and picks up grains of corn; the newborn
babe sucks its mother's breast—all in virtue of like acts on the part of their
ancestors, which, arising in the needs of the creature, and gradually becoming
automatic, have not varied during long ages, the tendency to repeat them being
transmitted within the germ from which insect, fish, bird, and man have
severally sprung."
Schneider
says: "It is a fact that men, especially in childhood, fear to go into a
dark cavern, or a gloomy wood. This feeling of fear arises, to be sure, partly
from the fact that we easily suspect that dangerous beasts may lurk in these
localities—a suspicion due to stories we have heard and read. But, on the other
hand, it is quite sure that this fear at a certain perception is also directly
inherited. Children who have been carefully guarded from all ghost stories are
nevertheless terrified and cry if led into a dark place, especially if sounds
are made there. Even an adult can easily observe that an uncomfortable timidity
steals over him in a lonely wood at night, although he may have the fixed
conviction that not the slightest danger is near. This feeling of fear occurs
in many men even in their own houses after dark, although it is
much stronger in a dark cavern or forest. The fact of such instinctive
fear is easily explicable when we consider that our savage ancestors through
immemorable generations were accustomed to meet with dangerous beasts in caverns,
especially bears, and were for the most part attacked by such beasts during the
night and in the woods, and that thus an inseparable association between the
perceptions of darkness, caverns, woods, and fear took place, and was
inherited."
James
says: "Nothing is commoner than the remark that man differs from lower
creatures by the almost total absence of instincts, and the assumption of their
work in him by reason. * * * We may confidently say that however uncertain
man's reactions upon his environment may sometimes seem in comparison with
those of the lower mammals, the uncertainty is probably not due to their
possession of any principles of action which he lacks. On the contrary,
man possesses all the impulses that they have, and a great many more besides. *
* * High places cause fear of a peculiarly sickening sort, though here again
individuals differ. The utterly blind instinctive character of the motor
impulses here is shown by the fact that they are almost always entirely
unreasonable, but that reason is powerless to suppress them. * * * Certain
ideas of supernatural agency, associated with real circumstances, produce
a peculiar kind of horror. This horror is probably explicable as the result of
a combination of simple horrors. To bring the ghostly terror to its maximum,
many unusual elements of the dreadful must combine, such as loneliness,
darkness, inexplicable sounds, especially of a dismal character, moving
pictures half discerned (or, if discerned, of dreadful aspect), and a
vertiginous baffling of the expectation. * * * In view of the fact that
cadaveric, reptilian, and underground horrors play so specific and constant a
part in many nightmares and forms of delirium, it seems not altogether unwise
to ask whether these forms of dreadful circumstance may not at a former period
have been more normal objects of the environment than now. The evolutionist
ought to have no difficulty in explaining these terrors, and the scenery that
provokes them, as relapses into the consciousness of the cave men, a consciousness
usually overlaid in us by experiences of a more recent date."
Instinctive
emotion manifests as an impulse arising from the dim recesses of the feeling or
emotional nature—an incentive toward a dimly conscious end. It differs from the
almost purely automatic nature of certain forms of reflex process, for its
beginning is a feeling arising from the subconscious regions, which strives to
excite an activity of conscious volition. The feeling is from the
subconscious, but the activity is conscious. The end may not be perceived in
consciousness, or at least is but dimly perceived, but the action leading to
the end is in full consciousness. Instinct is seen to have its origin in the
past experiences of the race, transmitted by heredity and preserved in the race
memory. It has for its object the preservation of the individual and of the
species. Its end is often something far removed in time from the moment, or the
welfare of the species rather than that of the individual; for instance, the
caterpillar providing for its future states, or the bird building its nest, or
the bees building cells and providing honey for their successors, for very few
bees live to partake of the honey which they have gathered and stored—they are
animated by "the spirit of the hive."
The
most elementary forms of the instinctive emotions are those which have to do
with the preservation of the individual, his comfort, and personal physical
welfare. This class of emotions comprises what are generally known as purely
"selfish" feelings, having little or no concern for the welfare of
others. In this class we find the emotional feelings which have to do with the
satisfaction of hunger and thirst, the securing of comfortable quarters and
warm clothing, and the spirit of combat and strife arising from the desire
to obtain these. These elemental feelings had their birth early in the
history of life, and indeed life itself depended very materially upon them for
its preservation and continuance. It was necessary for the primitive living
thing to be "selfish." When man appeared, only those survived who
manifested these feelings strongly; the others were pushed to the wall and
perished. Even in our civilization the man below the average in this class of
feelings will find it difficult to survive.
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