Nothing in Professor James’s work will be likely to strike the average reader as more paradoxical than his views on the subject of Emotion, which he must be allowed to state in his own words. After premising that he will limit his discussion, in the first instance, to what may be called the coarser emotions, as fear, grief, rage, love, in which every one recognises a strong organic reverberation, he goes on to say: “Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, _is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the existing fact, and that our feeling of the same changes, as they occur, is the emotion_. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we strike, cry, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily state following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually _feel_ afraid or angry. “Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure to meet with immediate disbelief. And yet neither many nor far-fetched considerations are required to mitigate its paradoxical character, and possibly to produce conviction of its truth. “To begin with, no reader of the last two chapters will be inclined to doubt the fact that _objects do excite bodily changes_ by a preorganised mechanism, or the farther fact _that the changes are so indefinitely numerous and subtle that the entire organism may be called a sounding-board_ which every change of consciousness, however slight, may make reverberate.... “The next thing to be noticed is this, that _every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is FELT, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs_....