Yet, though we must reject time as a cardinal principle of division in emotion, still we must acknowledge that the term retrospective emotion denotes a real group of mental phenomena, including revenge, regret, remorse, and kindred forms, which are marked as feeling for the past merely as past. However, pure retrospection is rare and late. The past does not for primitive mind stand by itself as something to be dwelt upon, to be thought about, to be moved by, and stirred to action. The immediate present absorbs the mind, and the past interests and excites only so far as bearing directly on the present. And so it is that the child lives in the present, the youth and man in the future, the old man in the past; and this denotes the relatively late appearance of pure retrospection and of emotion founded thereon. Emotion is first merely spectant, then prospective, then retrospective. However, when we say an emotion is concerned solely with the present in the very young, we mean, of course, the immediately prospective—that which has relation to but one sense and by association rouses emotion, as an apple, seen or handled by a child, awakens emotion, desire to taste. Where sense consciousness is not multiform, but single and uniform, as, doubtless, in very low organisms, there is no opportunity for any emotion, for there is no interpretation power. But the intensification of some one sense connection already attained may be a basis for emotion which we may loosely call emotion spectant, as when the greedy child eagerly eating an apple desires a larger bite, sweeter portion, etc. However,—though it has little classification value,—emotion can be only prospective or retrospective; and this is, of course, implied in its basis—representation. Emotion by its very nature must be a looking forward, or a looking backward, or both. As a feeling about, and not a direct feeling, this is obviously its unvariable cognitive content. The immediate and actual realization may be direct feeling or sensation, but it is never in itself emotion. Emotion is always over something, an experience of experience, and cannot thus be simple content. It is thus a consciously idealizing mode as distinguished from direct realization which is wholly self-contained.