FEELING ALWAYS PRESENT IN MENTAL CONTENT.--No phase of our mental life
is without the feeling element. We look at the rainbow with its
beautiful and harmonious blending of colors, and a feeling of pleasure
accompanies the sensation; then we turn and gaze at the glaring sun, and
a disagreeable feeling is the result. A strong feeling of pleasantness
accompanies the experience of the voluptuous warmth of a cozy bed on a
cold morning, but the plunge between the icy sheets on the preceding
evening was accompanied by the opposite feeling. The touch of a hand may
occasion a thrill of ecstatic pleasure, or it may be accompanied by a
feeling equally disagreeable. And so on through the whole range of
sensation; we not only _know_ the various objects about us through
sensation and perception, but we also _feel_ while we know. Cognition,
or the knowing processes, gives us our "whats"; and feeling, or the
affective processes, gives us our "hows." What is yonder object? A
bouquet. How does it affect you? Pleasurably.
If, instead of the simpler sensory processes which we have just
considered, we take the more complex processes, such as memory,
imagination, and thinking, the case is no different. Who has not reveled
in the pleasure accompanying the memories of past joys? On the other
hand, who is free from all unpleasant memories--from regrets, from pangs
of remorse? Who has not dreamed away an hour in pleasant anticipation of
some desired object, or spent a miserable hour in dreading some calamity
which imagination pictured to him? Feeling also accompanies our thought
processes. Everyone has experienced the feeling of the pleasure of
intellectual victory over some difficult problem which had baffled the
reason, or over some doubtful case in which our judgment proved correct.
And likewise none has escaped the feeling of unpleasantness which
accompanies intellectual defeat. Whatever the contents of our mental
stream, "we find in them, everywhere present, a certain color of passing
estimate, an immediate sense that they are worth something to us at any
given moment, or that they then have an interest to us."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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