Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of FeelingStanley, Hiram Miner
Philosophy
Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling
Stanley, Hiram Miner
Emotions
But it is not merely in exceptional states of developed consciousness
that we may trace the elementary form of feeling, but we may believe it
to be fundamental to consciousness in general. It is natural for us who
are so pervaded and dominated by sense of objectivity to see in it the
causal element in mentality; feeling and will seem consequent to it, and
we apprehend and feel accordingly. But the order of evolution was not
from knowledge in any form to feeling, but the reverse, and we may
suspect that in the completest analysis consciousness will still be
found to obey its original law. If the rise of knowledge was at the
instance of feeling, it is certainly unlikely that a fundamental order
should be more than apparently reversed.
The order of consciousness is really the reverse of the order conceived
by the objectifying consciousness, and this is a point where cognition
by its very nature as objective may be said to obscure itself. To
apprehend is to bring into relation, and the relation is very easily
attributed to what is purely unrelated, to pure subjectivity. Thus here
in the interpretation of merely subjective facts knowledge tends to
stand in its own way. It is only objectively that the objectifying can
appear causative of feeling; subjectively sense of object must always be
taken as subsequent to a pleasure-pain psychosis. The object
communicates or causes the feeling, but the subjective order is as such
of necessity the opposite; the object does not come in view; there is no
relating, until feeling has incited to it, and gradually the mind
reaches out to an objective order from the purely central fact. In every
psychical reaction there must be the purely central disturbance before
the rebound to the actuality occasioning the disturbance. I must feel
before I can discriminate or have any sense of the communication of the
feeling. This means that when external objects are brought into relation
with a wholly unanticipating consciousness, the first element in
psychosis is always pure pleasure or pure pain. Thus, on a cold, dark
day a sudden rush of sunlight on a blindfold man causes pleasure, then
feeling warm, and then sense of warming object. The glow of pleasure and
the pang of pain merely as such is in all cases precedent to any
objective reference. Pure centrality of response, I thus take to be the
initial element of all psychosis, primitive or developed. The first
tendency in every consciousness is pure pain-pleasure, complete
subjectivity which, however, in higher consciousness is so quickly lost
through practically consentaneous differentiation that all traces of it
seem wholly extinguished. Pure subjectivity must be pronounced the most
evanescent of all characters in developed minds and yet the most
constant. It is the inevitable precedent in every sensation and in every
perception. We always experience pleasure or pain before the pleasurable
or painful. A bright colour gives pleasure before we see it, and this
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