Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of FeelingStanley, Hiram Miner
Philosophy
Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling
Stanley, Hiram Miner
Emotions
the individually advantageous as determining element in evolution.
Despair is a disease of advanced and mature psychic life. Children are,
in general, incapable of despair. It implies a well-developed sense of
self and a general experience of the world. High and strong emotional
natures, but rather weak-willed and narrow of intelligence, are
predisposed to it. Occasions which would lead to despair will with lower
natures be unnoticed or lead merely to stolidity; while with the highest
natures, there comes heroic endeavour and wide searching for means and
methods.
CHAPTER X
_ANGER_
In studying any state of consciousness we first inquire what constitutes
its dominant factor; if this is sense of object, we call it a cognition;
if effortful action, it is a volition; if the marked feature is
pleasure-pain, we term it a feeling. Finding that the consciousness is a
feeling, we would next inquire whether the pleasure-pain is mainly
determined in its colouring by direct presentation, and so is a
sensation, or whether this dominant colouring comes indirectly through
representation, and is thus what we term an emotion. For example, the
distinction between “I feel a pain in my shoulder,” and “I feel pained
at your conduct” illustrates the most radical division of feeling. If
emotion is founded on an appreciation of the experienceable, which has
developed under natural selection, we must look upon the emotional power
in general and upon the various emotions in particular as merely
advantageous psychoses which are as clearly determined by general
evolutionary laws as the merely physical organs like heart, lungs,
wings, horns, etc. It is clearly desirable that the organism should look
before, should anticipate experience and so direct its way; but bare
anticipation has no value in itself unless it powerfully stimulates will
through emotion. All conscious life above the most primitive is
eminently and increasingly anticipatory, and so becomes more and more
infused with emotional powers. Among the earliest developed of these in
the struggle for existence are fear and anger. The fear group, embracing
large numbers of allied forms, simple and complex, has been discussed in
a general way in the preceding pages, and we now come to some
consideration of the correlative anger group.
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