Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of FeelingStanley, Hiram Miner
Philosophy
Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling
Stanley, Hiram Miner
Emotions
in itself no more than an objectification of physiological change, and
calls up no object whatever. In pure sensation there is no image of
anything, but it is merely a peculiar modifying of pleasure-pain
according to mode of physiological stimulus. A heat thrill does not
include objectification to any existences, not even to the physical body
of the organism sensing.
It is only by and through sense of physiological disturbance that
awareness of object is achieved. Intense sensation stimulates to full
cognition, to complete act of objectifying. This tendency of sensation
is illustrated by the common saying, “hunger sharpens wit”; and certain
it is that presentation of food objects is arrived at only by this
stimulus. The earliest objectifying, no doubt, arose from a
pain-sensation of some kind; but this primitive cognition of object was
purely general, just as primitive sensation was purely general. A world
of objects is not at first and at once attained, but only object barely
as such, dim awareness of a mere mass. In the earliest stage every
presentation is of a bare objectivity, so that one cognition differs
from another in no wise as regards content. This mere thing, which is
first full cognition content, is next to no-thing. When we try to
conceive this thing we inevitably foist in some special sensation and
perception, most generally sense of light and seeing; and the
explication just made in the previous sentence was undoubtedly
understood by the reader in visual terms. Our apprehension of object is
correlation of several modes, and it is most difficult to intimate in
any wording what bare undifferentiated apprehension of object may be. If
the embryology of mind were more thoroughly studied, we should
understand in some measure, for this stage most probably occurs in the
very earliest activities of every human and animal mind. A _totum
objectivum_, which is thing and nothing more, is, perhaps, occasionally
observable in our own consciousness when at very low ebb—at such times
when pure feeling and pure sensation become possible phases.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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