thrown wildly over the head. The Rev. Mr. Hagenauer has seen this latter
action in a terrified Australian. In other cases there is a sudden and
uncontrollable tendency to headlong flight; and so strong is this that
the boldest soldiers may be seized with a sudden panic."[48]
=Genesis of the Emotional Reactions.=--How come the various objects which
excite emotion to produce such special and different bodily effects?
This question was not asked till quite recently, but already some
interesting suggestions towards answering it have been made.
Some movements of expression can be accounted for as _weakened
repetitions of movements which formerly_ (when they were stronger) _were
of utility to the subject_. Others are similarly weakened repetitions of
movements which under other conditions were _physiologically necessary
concomitants of the useful movements_. Of the latter reactions the
respiratory disturbances in anger and fear might be taken as
examples--organic reminiscences, as it were, reverberations in
imagination of the blowings of the man making a series of combative
efforts, of the pantings of one in precipitate flight. Such at least is
a suggestion made by Mr. Spencer which has found approval. And he also
was the first, so far as I know, to suggest that other movements in
anger and fear could be explained by the nascent excitation of formerly
useful acts.
"To have in a slight degree," he says, "such psychical states as
accompany the reception of wounds, and are experienced during flight, is
to be in a state of what we call fear. And to have in a slight degree
such psychical states as the processes of catching, killing, and eating
imply, is to have the desires to catch, kill, and eat. That the
propensities to the acts are nothing else than nascent excitations of
the psychical state involved in the acts, is proved by the natural
language of the propensities. Fear, when strong, expresses itself in
cries, in efforts to escape, in palpitations, in tremblings; and these
are just the manifestations that go along with an actual suffering of
the evil feared. The destructive passion is shown in a general tension
of the muscular system, in gnashing of teeth and protrusion of the
claws, in dilated eyes and nostrils in growls; and these are weaker
forms of the actions that accompany the killing of prey. To such
objective evidences every one can add subjective evidences. Everyone can
testify that the psychical state called fear consists of mental
representations of certain painful results; and that the one called
anger consists of mental representations of the actions and impressions
which would occur while inflicting some kind of pain."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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