Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of FeelingStanley, Hiram Miner
Philosophy
Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling
Stanley, Hiram Miner
Emotions
Revival pains are not representations of pains as in some way coming
from object. Emotion requires representation, and cannot occur in any
presentation or re-presentation chain. True pre-perception is not merely
perceiving the thing before its effects in feeling are experienced, but
it is a _representing_ the feeling quality of the object before, in any
given case, this quality is directly experienced. This obviously rests
on past experience, but the connecting of object with pleasure-pain
experience is at all times, as before intimated, equally a problem.
Emotion and representation are built not of revivals, but upon them
perceived as such. At some critical moment, in some rather early period
in mental development, a consciousness which was pain _plus_ sense of
object, realized, under the pressure of struggle for existence, the
feeling quality of the object, and there arose with the knowledge of
object as pain-giver the painful emotion. And as soon as object is not
merely cognized, but cognized as pain-giver, it may be feared. The
moment that object was known as a pain agent, then fear of the object
came, and thus true anticipatory action arose. We are said, indeed, to
fear objects, to fear men, animals, etc., but, in truth, the fear is
never of the object as such, but only in view of its pain agency. The
cognizing the experienced and experienceable as such seems then a
peculiar and distinct process in fear and in all emotion, a _genus_
apart which cannot be constituted by interaction of simple elements. The
growth of mind is largely in multiplying and enlarging the signs of
experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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