Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage : $b an account of recent researches into the function of emotional excitementCannon, Walter B. (Walter Bradford)
Science
Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage : $b an account of recent researches into the function of emotional excitement
Cannon, Walter B. (Walter Bradford)
Emotions; Mental health; Mind and body
Although there is increasing opposition to the display of the
fighting emotions and instincts in war, nevertheless the admirable
moral and physical qualities, claimed by the militarists to be
the unique products of war, are too valuable to be lost. As
McDougall[226] has indicated, when the life of ideas becomes richer,
and the means we take to overcome obstructions to our efforts more
refined and complex, the instinct to fight ceases to express itself
in its crude natural manner, save when most intensely excited, and
becomes rather a source of increased energy of action towards the end
set by any other instinct; the energy of its impulses adds itself
to and reënforces that of other impulses and so helps us to overcome
our difficulties. In this lies its great value for civilized man. A
man devoid of the pugnacious instinct would not only be incapable
of anger, but would lack this great source of reserve energy which
is called into play in most of us by any difficulty in our path.
Thus the very efficiency of a war against war, as well as struggle
against other evils that beset civilized society, rests on the
preservation and use of aggressive feeling and the instinct to
attack. From this point of view the insistence by the militarists
that we must accept human nature as we find it, and that the attempt
to change it is foolish, seems a more justifiable attitude than
that of the pacifists who belittle the fighting qualities and urge
that changing them is a relatively simple process. We should not
wish them changed. Even if in the war against war a means should
be established of securing international justice, and if through
coöperative action the decrees of justice were enforced, so that
the occasions which would arouse belligerent emotions and instincts
were much reduced, there would still remain the need of recognizing
their elemental character and their possible usefulness to society.
What is needed is not a suppression of these capacities to feel and
act, but their diversion into other channels where they may have
satisfactory expression.
Moral Substitutes for Warfare
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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