The Origin and Nature of the Emotions; Miscellaneous PapersCrile, George Washington
Science
The Origin and Nature of the Emotions; Miscellaneous Papers
Crile, George Washington
Emotions; Psychophysiology
When this conception is applied to the human beings of today,
certain mysterious phenomena are at once elucidated. It must be borne
in mind that man has not been presented with any new organs to meet
the requirements of his present state of civilization; indeed, not only
does he possess organs of the same type as those of his savage fellows,
but of the same type also as those possessed by the lower animals even.
In fact, man has reached his present status of civilization with
the primary equipment of brutish organs. Perhaps the most striking
difference between man and animals lies in the greater control
which man has gained over his primitive instinctive reactions.
As compared with the entire duration of organic evolution,
man came down from his arboreal abode and assumed his new role
of increased domination over the physical world but a moment ago.
And now, though sitting at his desk in command of the complicated
machinery of civilization, when he fears a business catastrophe
his fear is manifested in the terms of his ancestral physical battle
in the struggle for existence. He cannot fear intellectually,
he cannot fear dispassionately, he fears with all his organs,
and the same organs are stimulated and inhibited as if, instead of it
being a battle of credit, of position, or of honor, it were a physical
battle with teeth and claws. Whether the cause of acute fear
be moral, financial, social, or stage fright, the heart beats wildly,
the respirations are accelerated, perspiration is increased,
there are pallor, trembling, indigestion, dry mouth, etc.
The phenomena are those which accompany physical exertion
in self-defense or escape. There is not one group of phenomena
for the acute fear of the president of a bank in a financial
crash and another for the hitherto trusted official who suddenly
and unexpectedly faces the imminent probability of the penitentiary;
or one for a patient who unexpectedly finds he has a cancer
and another for the hunter when he shoots his first big game.
Nature has but one means of response to fear, and whatever its cause
the phenomena are always the same--always physical.
If the stimulus of fear be repeated from day to day, whether in
the case of a mother anxious on account of the illness of a child;
a business man struggling against failure; a politician under contest
for appointment; a broker in the daily hazard of his fortune;
litigants in legal battle, or a jealous lover who fears a rival;
the countless real as well as the baseless fears in daily life,
in fact, all forms of fear, as it seems to me, express themselves
in like terms of ancestral physical contests. On this law,
fear dominates the various organs and parts of the body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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