II. _Composition by combination._—The emotion resulting from this mental procedure differs, in its nature and characteristics, from its constituent elements, and appears in the consciousness as a new product, an irreducible unit. Here the analysis, uncertain and hazardous as it often is, cannot give us everything which we find in the synthesis—a psychological case which has well-known equivalents in chemistry. A Danish psychologist, Sibbern, whom I believe to have been the first to point out this mode of composition of the emotions under the name of mixed sentiments, defines them as “Those in which the disagreeable excites the agreeable, and _vice versâ_, so that one is not antecedent to the other, but both act simultaneously, and the disappearance of the one involves the disappearance of the other.”[165] In fact, there is not merely coexistence, but reciprocity of action; if you suppress a single term the emotion changes its nature, as we shall see by the following examples. ----- Footnote 165: Sibbern’s _Psychologie_ (1856), having been published in Danish, is only known to me through extracts quoted by his compatriots, Höffding (_Psychologie_, 2nd German ed., pp. 330, 331) and Lehmann (_Hauptgesetze_, pp. 247 _et seq._). These two authors may also be consulted with advantage on this question. ----- In the emotion accompanying all forms of activity in which we _seek_ great difficulties to overcome, or risks to run (as in hunting wild animals, dangerous mountain climbing, exploring expeditions, etc.), if we suppress the unknown element, the risk, the danger, there is no longer any attraction. If we suppress this attraction and its accompanying pleasure we have nothing left but fear or disgust. This particular emotion exists only through the interdependence of its various elements. It can be produced in a modified form, but without changing its nature, in the spectators of bull-fights, wild beast tamers, violent struggles, and thrilling dramas, and in a lesser degree by mere recitation or reading. I have already mentioned melancholy (in the ordinary, not the medical sense) as one form of the luxury of grief. It implies the calling up of pleasant states, past or distant, _plus_ a state of present sadness which surrounds them. Suppress one or other of these elements and the melancholy vanishes. If the pleasurable element, however slight, disappears, nothing remains but grief pure and simple. In this combination sometimes the one element predominates, sometimes the other, and the resultant feeling receives a special emotional _timbre_, as the case may be.