“The best proof that the immediate cause of emotion is a physical effect on the nerves is furnished by _those pathological states in which the emotion is objectless_. One of the chief merits, in fact, of the view which I propose, seems to be that we can so easily formulate by its means pathological cases and normal cases under a common scheme. In every asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived fear, anger, melancholy, or conceit, and others of an equally unmotived apathy, which persists in spite of the best of outward reasons why it should give way. In the former cases we must suppose the nervous machinery to be so ‘labile’ in some one emotional direction that almost every stimulus (however inappropriate) causes it to upset in that way, and to engender the particular complex of feelings of which the psychic body of that emotion consists. Thus, to take one special instance, if inability to draw deep breath, fluttering of the heart, and that peculiar epigastric change felt as ‘precordial anxiety,’ with an irresistible tendency to take a somewhat crouching attitude and to sit still, and with perhaps other visceral processes not now known, all spontaneously occur together in a certain person; his feeling of their combination is the emotion of dread, and he is the victim of what is known as morbid fear” (p. 458). Now, it is evident, of course, in such a case as this, that such a combination of feelings as is here described is not a fortuitous coincidence of so many independent sensations. They must have a common starting-point, which cannot well be elsewhere than in the brain. But if this is the case, it seems to me to be begging the question to assume that the sensations and not the emotion are the primary thing. On the assumption that fear, in the normal condition, is the cause of the disturbances of respiration, circulation, and the like, which accompany it, it is as easy to formulate normal and pathological cases under a common scheme, by supposing it to be the cause of the like disturbances in cases of morbid fear, as on the theory of Professor James. It seems to me, then, that the theory does not satisfactorily account for the facts, so far as the involuntary, reflex accompaniments of motion are concerned.