The second deals with the special emotions. This detailed study is of great importance for reasons which will be explained later on, especially because we must not rest in generalities; it furnishes a means of control and verification. The nature of the emotional life cannot be understood unless we follow it in its incessant transformations—that is to say, in its history. To separate it from social, moral, and religious institutions, from the æsthetic and intellectual movements which translate it and incarnate it, is to reduce it to a dead and empty abstraction. Thus an attempt has been made to follow all the emotions one after the other in the progress of their development, noting the successive movements of their evolution or their retrogression. The pathology of each emotion has been sketched to complete and throw light on the study. I have tried to show that beneath an appearance of confusion, incoherence, and promiscuity, there is, from the morbid to the normal, from the complex to the simple, a conducting thread which will always bring us back to the point of origin. A work which has for its aim to set forth the present situation of the psychology of feeling and emotion might have been made very long. By eliminating every digression and all historical exposition, it has been made as short as possible. TH. RIBOT. CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION—THE EVOLUTION OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE 1 In all affective manifestations there are two elements: the motor states or impulses, which are primary; the agreeable or painful states, which are secondary—Unconscious (organic or protoplasmic) sensibility; micro-organisms—Chemical interpretation; psychological interpretation—Are there pure states of feeling?—Affirmative facts—The period of needs, the instinct of conservation-The period of primitive emotions—How they may be determined; the genetic or chronological method—Fear, anger, affection, the self-feeling, sexual emotion—Are joy and grief emotions?—The abstract emotions and their conditions—The passions are the equivalent in feeling of an intellectual obsession. _Part I._—GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY. CHAPTER I. PHYSICAL PAIN 25