Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy
Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.
Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy; Political science; Science
conditions of the race make the habits persistent, this progressive
modification may go on to the extent of producing emotions so far
distinct as to seem new? And if so, we may suspect that such new
emotions, and by implication all emotions analytically considered,
consist of aggregated and consolidated groups of those simpler feelings
which habitually occur together in experience. When, in the
circumstances of any race, some one kind of action or set of actions,
sensation or set of sensations, is usually followed, or accompanied, by
various other sets of actions or sensations, and so entails a large mass
of pleasurable or painful states of consciousness; these, by frequent
repetition, become so connected together that the initial action or
sensation brings the ideas of all the rest crowding into consciousness:
producing, in some degree, the pleasures or pains that have before been
felt in reality. And when this relation, besides being frequently
repeated in the individual, occurs in successive generations, all the
many nervous actions involved tend to grow organically connected. They
become incipiently reflex; and, on the occurrence of the appropriate
stimulus, the whole nervous apparatus which in past generations was
brought into activity by this stimulus, becomes nascently excited. Even
while yet there have been no individual experiences, a vague feeling of
pleasure or pain is produced; constituting what we may call the body of
the emotion. And when the experiences of past generations come to be
repeated in the individual, the emotion gains both strength and
definiteness; and is accompanied by the appropriate specific ideas.
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