The older books on psychology devote a great deal of space to the =classification= of emotions; modern psychology has rather been concerned to bring emotion into the laboratory, and to trace the emotive pattern under experimental control. It was natural to begin with the simpler modes of feeling, and to proceed from them to the more complex; and experiments were therefore made on the sense-feelings. We have seen that the results are not yet definitely assured (pp. 83 f.), so that it is still too early to write an adequate psychology of the emotions. On the whole, however, it seems that _the three dimensions of sense-feeling will serve for a classification of emotion_: joy and fear are agreeable and disagreeable emotions, anger and grief are exciting and subduing, hope and relief are straining and relaxing. It is not difficult to carry this classification further; to find, for instance, agreeable-exciting, disagreeable-exciting, agreeable-subduing, disagreeable-subduing, even agreeable-exciting-straining, agreeable-subduing-relaxing forms, and so on and so forth; but nothing is gained, at present, by drawing such distinctions. We shall therefore leave the classification thus in the rough. One point only calls for comment. We said that _emotion is a suddenly aroused experience_, beginning abruptly and dying down slowly; yet the straining and relaxing emotions—hope, anxiety, disappointment, relief—seem, on the contrary, to arise slowly and gradually. It is difficult to be sure of the facts; but we must be careful not to confuse the starting of an emotion with what occurs after it has started. It may very likely grow in strength; and it will follow, as we have said, a characteristic course in time, until it reaches its natural end. Either of these things—the growth in intensity or the development in time—may give the illusion of a gradual beginning. If we abstract from them, then it appears that these straining-relaxing emotions really come suddenly; they occupy the mind all at once; we shift directly from grief to hope, from satisfaction to anxiety, from fear to relief; the emotions may alternate in our experience, but they set in abruptly. We say of a sick friend ‘The doctor says that we may begin to hope,’ or ‘The relatives are beginning to be a little anxious’; but as a matter of psychological fact the hope and the anxiety appear to come and go, as mental patterns, quite suddenly; the situation touches off, actualises, now the one set of tendencies, and now the other. So our general description of emotion may stand.