The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abasement are of a
unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as a primitive emotional
species as are, for example, rage or pain. Each has its own peculiar
physiognomical expression. In self-satisfaction the extensor muscles
are innervated, the eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling and
elastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon the lips.
This whole complex of symptoms is seen in an exquisite way in lunatic
asylums, which always contain some patients who are literally mad
with conceit, and whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or
swaggering gait is in tragic contrast with their lack of any valuable
personal quality. It is in these same castles of despair that we find
the strongest examples of the opposite physiognomy, in good people who
think they have committed 'the unpardonable sin' and are lost forever,
who crouch and cringe and slink from notice, and are unable to speak
aloud or look us in the eye. Like fear and like anger, in similar
morbid conditions, these opposite feelings of Self may be aroused with
no adequate exciting cause. And in fact we ourselves know how the
barometer of our self-esteem and confidence rises and falls from one
day to another through causes that seem to be visceral and organic
rather than rational, and which certainly answer to no corresponding
variations in the esteem in which we are held by our friends. Of the
origin of these emotions in the race, we can speak better when we have
treated of--
3. SELF-SEEKING AND SELF-PRESERVATION.
These words cover a large number of our fundamental instinctive
impulses. We have those of _bodily self-seeking_, those of _social
self-seeking_, and those of _spiritual self-seeking_.
All the ordinary useful reflex actions and movements of alimentation
and defence are acts of bodily self-preservation. Fear and anger prompt
to acts that are useful in the same way. Whilst if by self-seeking we
mean the providing for the future as distinguished from maintaining
the present, we must class both anger and fear with the hunting, the
acquisitive, the home-constructing and the tool-constructing instincts,
as impulses to self-seeking of the bodily kind. Really, however, these
latter instincts, with amativeness, parental fondness, curiosity and
emulation, seek not only the development of the bodily Self, but that
of the material Self in the widest possible sense of the word.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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