How to Read Human Nature: Its Inner States and Outer FormsAtkinson, William Walker
Science
How to Read Human Nature: Its Inner States and Outer Forms
Atkinson, William Walker
Character; Personality; Phrenology; Physiognomy
"The feeling, in the coarser emotions, results from the bodily
expression.... My theory is that the bodily changes follow directly the
perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same
changes as they occur _is_ the emotion.... Particular perceptions
certainly do produce widespread bodily effects by a sort of immediate
physical influence, antecedent to the arousal of an emotion or emotional
idea.... Every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it may be, is
_felt_, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs.... If we fancy some
strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it
all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we have nothing left behind....
A disembodied human emotion is a sheer nonentity. I do not say that it
is a contradiction in the nature of things, or that pure spirits are
necessarily condemned to cold intellectual lives; but I say that for
_us_ emotion disassociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable. The
more closely I scrutinize my states, the more persuaded I become that
whatever 'coarse' affections and passions I have are in very truth
constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes which we ordinarily
call their expression or consequence.... But our emotions must always be
_inwardly_ what they are, whatever may be the physiological ground of
their apparition. If they are deep, pure, worthy, spiritual facts on any
conceivable theory of their physiological source, they remain no less
deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensational
theory."
Kay says: "Does the mind or spirit of man, whatever it may be, in its
actings in and through the body, leave a material impression or trace in
its structure of every conscious action it performs, which remains
permanently fixed, and forms a material record of all that it has done
in the body, to which it can afterward refer as to a book and recall to
mind, making it again, as it were, present to it?... We find nature
everywhere around us recording its movements and marking the changes it
has undergone in material forms,--in the crust of the earth, the
composition of the rocks, the structure of the trees, the conformation
of our bodies, and those spirits of ours, so closely connected with our
material bodies, that so far as we know, they can think no thought,
perform no action, without their presence and co-operation, may have
been so joined in order to preserve a material and lasting record of
all that they think and do."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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