It is, however, undeniable that even joy gradually decreases if it is allowed an unimpeded outlet. But that is often a result of bodily fatigue, which makes thought as well as feeling impossible. Pleasure may also increase _qua_ feeling, if its most outward manifestations are controlled. But hereby the activity has only, as Spencer himself remarks, been directed into new channels.[65] The motor impulses reflect themselves inwards and accumulate when their outlet is stopped. From bodily movements, which are its simplest and most natural expression, joy may thus be diverted into the region of thought. When a savage has attained so high a state of development as to be able to control the impulse to dance and yell for joy, the first dithyramb has been composed. It is impossible for us to estimate the relative importance of internal and external activity. All we can say is that a joy, the outward expressions of which are controlled, probably gains in durability. But on the other hand it is possible that a joy which has been allowed a free discharge, in the very moment of expression is stronger _qua_ feeling. If the motor impulses find no outlet in any direction, the emotional state will, as has already been pointed out, become more and more affected with elements of pain. When the physiological counterpart of an emotion takes the form of an inhibition, the feeling-tone will of course gain in intensity in the same degree as wider and wider areas of activity come under the influence of the arrest. This law can also be observed in the course of development of all pain-emotions. Sorrow, despair, humiliation, and so on, are relatively mild as long as the inhibition is restricted to the voluntary muscles. They acquire their full and proper strength as feeling only when the involuntary activities take part in the functional disturbance. And we can often notice in ourselves how, in the same degree as a painful emotion increases, the inhibition cuts its way deeper and deeper into the organism.[66] Humiliation, which of all emotions is the most hopelessly and irredeemably painful, is in its higher degrees always accompanied by functional changes which make themselves felt even in our digestive organs. Literature, to which in questions of emotional psychology we must apply for the information which no experiment can supply, proves that it is hard to swallow. It has a bitter taste, and is sickening even in purely physical sense.[67] The greatest grief, on the other hand, that man has been able to imagine manifests itself physiologically as a complete internal as well as external paralysis, such as is suggested by the Greek myth of the sorrowing mother turned into stone.