In popular parlance the term ‘emotion’ stands for those happenings in minds which accompany such exhibitions of unusual excitement as weeping, shouting, blushing, trembling, and so on. But in the usage of most critics it has taken an extended sense, thereby suffering quite needlessly in its usefulness. For them it stands for any noteworthy ‘goings on’ in the mind almost regardless of their nature. The true and profound emotions, as spoken of by critics, are often lacking in all the characteristics which govern the more refined linguistic usage of common people, and, as it happens, of psychologists also, for what may perhaps be regarded now as the standard usage in psychology, sets out from the very same bodily changes accompanying experience as were noted above. Two main features characterise every emotional experience. One of these is a diffused reaction in the organs of the body brought about through the sympathetic systems. The other is a tendency to action of some definite kind or group of kinds. These extensive changes in the visceral and vascular systems, characteristically in respiration and in glandular secretion, commonly take place in response to situations which call some instinctive tendency into play. As a result of all these changes a tide of sensations of internal bodily origin comes into consciousness. It is generally agreed that these sensations make up at least the main part of the peculiar consciousness of an emotion. Whether they are necessary to it or not is disputed. It may perhaps be suggested that insufficient attention has been paid in the theory of emotion to images of such sensations. The fact that fear, for example, may be felt in the absence of any detectable bodily changes of the kind described (a disputed fact) may be explained by supposing images of these sensations to be taking their place. These sensations, or images of them, are then a main ingredient of an emotional experience and account for its peculiar ‘colour’ or tone, for the voluminousness and massiveness as well as for the extreme acuteness of emotions. But of equal or greater importance are the changes in consciousness due to reactions in the nervous systems which control movement, governing muscular response to the stimulating situation. These range, in the case of fear, from the awakening of a simple tendency, an impulse to run away or hide under the table, to such elaborate readjustments as we make when we prepare to counter a threat against some favourite opinion. As a rule a process of extraordinary complexity takes place between perceiving the situation and finding a mode of meeting it. This complicated process contributes the rest of its peculiar flavour to an emotional experience. A more detailed discussion from the same angle of the points raised in this and the surrounding chapters will be found in _The Meaning of Psychology_ (1926) by C. K. Ogden, where the author’s view of mental activity is elaborated.