Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling — John Shaqi
Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of FeelingStanley, Hiram Miner
Philosophy
Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling
Stanley, Hiram Miner
Emotions
The chief difficulty of the theory of bodily advantage and disadvantage
as conditioning pleasure and pain comes not from any such instance as
the sugar of lead phenomenon; but it lies in the fact that life
progressiveness, enlargement, specialization, that which is to the
highest profit of life, is uniformly reached only by painful struggle.
It is only by intense struggle, by supremest, painfullest effort, that
those new psychic forms are initiated and developed which are of the
utmost service to the organism. The act of adjustment to a new
circumstance is so extremely difficult and painful that it is attempted
by few and achieved by very few of any set of organisms. By an act of
most painful struggle the fittest survive; and the rest, the vast
majority, who could not key themselves to that pitch, perish. Adjustment
to the ordinary conditions is simply a free using of intelligence and
energy integrated and stored by ancestors when these conditions were new
to them. The adjustments which are so spontaneously made by new-born
animals as response to environment were once new, and secured and
integrated for inheritance by the most painful and persistent effort.
Such is the inertia and conservatism of life that while it moves
spontaneously in grooves already made, it does not rejoice in the toil
of real progress. The struggle by which the greatest life advances have
been accomplished has always been intensely painful in itself, whatever
the aftermath of pleasure may be, the pleasure of achievement and
creation, the satisfaction at successful effort, which is plainly a very
late psychosis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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