We are living in an age when the contrast between intellectual complexity
and emotional simplicity is becoming so great that the emotional
reactions and, because of them, the creative and destructive acts
of men are more and more unpredictable and variegated. Intellectual
attainment has reached an extraordinary height. Emotions have not been
trained or developed, if indeed they are capable of development. They
may not be, though it will be assumed in a later chapter that they are
susceptible of the kind of training that is produced by reassociation.
Emotions are the organic sensations perceived by the ego as the result
of reactions, caused by impressions from the external world, reactions
taking place within the tissues of the body, and associated with external
impressions. Emotions are no more complex than they were thousands of
years ago.
When we say that the emotions of one man are finer than those of another
man we may mean either that he has repressed his sexual emotions, which
we have not been taught to call fine, or that his emotions of surprise,
awe, love, hate, jealousy and others are aroused by, that is, associated
with, more complicated external impressions than they are in another
man. Or we may call fine emotions the constructive emotions with which
pleasure is associated.
The emotions as physical reactions have not changed in ages of evolution.
We have the same bodies as sounding boards on which the external
impressions reverberate, the same bodies practically that men had five
thousand years ago. But the number and variety of external experiences
has multiplied in geometrical ratio. The result is that, while
intellectually we are men of 1923, emotionally we may be cave men or
apes. With the products of modern civilization, the material advances and
complications, the means of intercommunication, of graphic representation
and of the transformation of natural resources we are, as Robinson says
in _The Mind in the Making_, merely _monkeying_. In spite of numerous
sporadic beginnings in the line of social use of the results of modern
scientific advancement we are as a race making almost no progress in the
direction of fine living.
§ 2
This is no more clearly evident in any other sphere of life than in
marriage. With all the intellectual progress made by humanity up to the
first quarter of the twentieth century marriage is still looked upon by
many men merely as an opportunity for either legitimized procreation
or unlimited sensual self-gratification. A man puts as much intellect
into his vocation as he is capable of. Into his marriage he puts not
intellect, but the emotions of the ancestral ape. Even in his sublimated
war of business he knows that a consideration of the other fellow is in
the end a winning card, and the word “service” has come into prominence
as advertising material. But in his marriage he uses the same crassly
selfish methods he has used for thousands, perhaps millions of years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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