(2) THE FACTOR OF EMOTION Unfortunately for the attainment of truth, nothing has a greater influence on the formation of human opinion and character, and is therefore more inextricably bound up with all questions of politics, religion, morality and art, than the complex mental state we call emotion. Nothing affects the well-being, health and happiness of mankind more directly. Emotion may perhaps be defined as a continuity of complex presentations manifested in organic sensation. In a sense, emotion is feeling, which is the wider term; it is an effect, which therefore cannot exist without its cause, though the same cause under different circumstances may produce many varied emotions, both in quality and degree. The visible manifestation of emotional disturbance need bear no relation to its intensity. People of the greatest nervous sensibility, in whom emotional excitements are most deeply and acutely felt, often keep their emotions best under control. They are not, of course, able to inhibit the involuntary or visceral processes which are affected by emotion: heart, pulse, salivary glands and respiratory system may indeed tell the tale; but the will may prevent the contagion spreading further: the intellect may remain calm, thought and action slow and deliberate, demeanour outwardly cool and collected.[69] The lower the level of will-power and intellectual development, the more closely dependent will all cerebral processes be upon emotional states and reactions; at the same time, the emotions become cruder, less complex and subtle and even less deeply felt. Children and savages are almost entirely emotional, in the sense that they think emotionally and have no power of intellectual detachment. Professor Ward describes the effect of emotion on thought very clearly as follows: "Emotional excitement--and at the outset the natural man does not think much in cold blood--quickens the flow of ideas.... Familiar associations hurry attention away from the proper topic, and thought becomes not only discursive but wandering; in place of concepts of fixed and crystalline completeness, such as logic describes, we may find a congeries of ideas but imperfectly compacted into one generic idea, subject to continual transformation, and implicating much that is irrelevant and confusing."[70] There are few people indeed whose views on religion, politics, art, and the rights and relations of the sexes are not chiefly emotional values. We may think that our convictions are based on logical reasonings, but the force of childish impressions and associations, and the unresisted bias of passions and interests, are the processes by which they have been cultivated, and rational thought has been devoted to the task of finding reasons for the convictions that are ready made.