Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of SexThomas, William Isaac
Science
Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex
Thomas, William Isaac
Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
The more motile organisms are constantly, by very reason of their
motility, encountering situations which put a strain upon the
attention. The quest for food leads to encounters with members of
their own and of different species; the resulting fight, pursuit, and
flight are accompanied by the powerful emotions of anger and fear.
The emotion is, as Darwin has pointed out, a part of the effort to
reaccommodate, since it is a physiological preparation for action
appropriate to the type of situation in question.[242] The strain upon
the attention, the affective bodily condition, and the motor activity
appear usually in the same connection, and, from the standpoint
of biological design, the action concluding the series of bodily
activities is of advantage to the organism.
In animal life the situation is simple. Whether the animal decides to
fight for it or to run for it, he has at any rate two plain courses
before him, and the relation between his emotional states and the
type of situation is rather definitely fixed racially, and relatively
constant. Even in the associated life of animals the type of reaction
is not much changed, and is here also instinctively fixed. But in
mankind the instinctive life is overshadowed or rivaled by the freedom
of initiative secured through an extraordinary development of the
power of inhibition and of associative memory, while, at the same
time, this freedom of choice is hindered and checked by the presence
of others. The social life of mankind brings out a thousand situations
unprovided for in the instincts and unanticipated in consciousness.
In the midst, then, of a situation relatively new in race experience,
where advantage is still the all-important consideration, and where
this can no longer be secured either by fighting or running, but by
the good opinion of one's fellows as well, we may look for some new
strains upon the attention and some emotions not common to animal
life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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