Frink remarks that “the emotion, from the point of view of physiology,
_is_ these various preparatory changes in the content of the blood,
in the innervation of the various muscles, endocrine glands and other
viscera. The emotion, from the point of view of psychology, is the
afferent, sensory report of these changes.” And William James’ classical
statement is as follows: “Bodily changes follow directly the perception
of the exciting fact, and our feeling of the same changes as they occur
_is_ the emotion.... The more rational statement is that we feel sorry
because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,
and not that we cry, strike or tremble, because we are sorry, angry or
fearful, as the case may be.”
While most emotions of the simple type, like surprise, admiration, joy
and others are in infancy and childhood originally, though not innately
associated with certain definite sensations from the outer world, they
are frequently reassociated by experience through the influence of the
environment, so that, in later life, one enjoys or detests quite the
opposite of what caused instinctive attraction or repulsion in early life.
The complex emotions of love, jealousy and hate are not, in their
greatest complexity, existent in humans before puberty, although the
unsynthetized elements out of which they are finally composed are present
in childhood, particularly hate. This, according to psychoanalysis, is
a more archaic emotion than love and is not its direct opposite. It is
likely that human emotions are progressing from a dominant hatred toward
a reigning love.
Love in its fully synthetic and complicated form is not only impossible
in children, but its higher types, spoken of in this book as _erotic_,
occur at their best in those more intricately complicated personalities
that are the peculiar product of modern civilization.
The expression of erotic emotion does not involve activity on the man’s
part solely, and absolute passivity on the woman’s. Passion and passive
are etymologically the same word, but the natural inferences from this
are erroneous. It happened that emotions were called passions by some old
Roman pseudo-philosopher who was translating Stoic doctrines and used
“passions” to translate _patheia_, which, in Greek, means “sufferings.”
The Stoics believed that emotions were sufferings inflicted on men by
Fate. Their great discovery was that men could conquer them by training
(_askesis_). Hence comes “asceticism”: the training by which a man might
free himself from the suffering which was caused by feeling anything.
Now we are beginning to realize that there are emotions that _ought_ to
be felt, and repeatedly—emotions that are as necessary to the growth of
the soul as food is to the growth of the body. Asceticism (training),
therefore, of the future will be a training in the emotions of love.
§ 34
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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