I remember seeing an English couple sit for more than an hour on a piercing February day in the Academy at Venice before the celebrated 'Assumption'
by Titian; and when I, after being chased from room to room by the cold, concluded to get into the sunshine as fast as possible and let the pictures go, but before leaving drew reverently near to them to learn with what superior forms of susceptibility they might be endowed, all I
overheard was the woman's voice murmuring: "What a deprecatory expression her face wears! What self-abneg ation! How unworthy she feels of the honor she is receiving!" Their honest hearts had been kept warm all the time by a glow of spurious sentiment that would have fairly made old Titian sick.Mr.Ruskin somewhere makes the (for him terrible) admission that religious people as a rule care little for pictures, and that when they do care for them they generally prefer the worst ones to the best.
Yes! in every art, in every science, there is the keen perception of certain relations being right or not, and there is the emotional flush and thrill consequent thereupon.And these are two things, not one.In the former of them it is that experts and masters are at home.The latter accompaniments are bodily commotions that they may hardly feel, but that may be experienced in their fulness by crétins and philistines in whom the critical judgment is at its lowest ebb.The 'marvels' of Science, about which so much edifying popular literature is written, are apt to be 'caviare' to the men in the laboratories.And even divine Philosophy itself, which common mortals consider so 'sublime' an occupation, on account of the vastness of its data and outlook, is too apt to the practical philosopher himself to he but a sharpening and tightening business, a matter of 'points,' of screwing down things, of splitting hairs, and of the 'intent' rather than the 'extent' of conceptions.Very little emotion here! -- except the effort of setting the attention fine, and the feeling of ease and relief (mainly in the breathing apparatus) when the inconsistencies are overcome and the thoughts run smoothly for a while.Emotion and cognition seem then parted even in this last retreat; and cerebral processes are almost feelingless, so far as we can judge, until they summon help from parts below.NO SPECIAL BRAIN-CENTRES FOR EMOTION.
If the neural process underlying emotional consciousness be what I have now sought to prove it, the physi- ology of the brain becomes a simpler matter than has been hitherto supposed.Sensational, associational, and motor elements are all that the organ need contain.The physiologists who, during the past few years, have been so industriously exploring the brain's functions, have limited their explanations to its cognitive and volitional performances.Dividing the brain into sensory and motor centres, they have found their division to be exactly paralleled by the analysis made by empirical psychology of the perceptive and volitional parts of the mind into their simplest elements.But the emotions have been so ignored in all these researches that one is tempted to suppose that if these investigators were asked for a theory of them in brain-terms, they would have to reply, either that they had as yet bestowed no thought upon the subject, or that they had found it so difficult to make distinct hypotheses that the matter lay among the problems of the future, only to be taken up after the simpler ones of the present should have been definitively solved.
And yet it is even now certain that of two things concerning the emotions, one must be true.Either separate and special centres, affected to them alone, are their brain-seat, or else they correspond to processes occurring in the motor and sensory centres already assigned, or in others like them, not yet known.If the former be the case, we must deny the view that is current, and hold the cortex to be something more than the surface of 'projection'
for every sensitive spot and every- muscle in the body.If the latter be the case, rye must ask whether the emotional process in the sensory or motor centre be an altogether peculiar one, or whether it resembles the ordinary perceptive processes of which those centres are already recognized to be the seat.Now if the theory I have defended be true, the latter alternative is all that it demands.Supposing the cortex to contain parts, liable to be excited by changes in each special sense-organ, in each portion of the skin, in each muscle, each joint, and each viscus, and to contain absolutely nothing else, we still have a scheme capable of representing the process of the emotions.An object falls on a sense-organ, affects a cortical part, and is perceived; or else the latter, excited inwardly, gives rise to an idea of the same object.Quick as a flash, the reflex currents pass down through their preordained channels, alter the condition of muscle, skin, and viscus; and these alterations, perceived, like the original object, in as many portions of the cortex, combine with it in consciousness and transform it from an object-simply-apprehended into an object-emotionally-felt.
No new principles have to be invoked, nothing postulated beyond the ordinary reflex circuits, and the local centres admitted in one shape or another by all to exist.EMOTIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS.
The revivability in memory of the emotions , like that of all the feelings of the lower senses, is very small.We can remember that we underwent grief or rapture, but not just how the grief or rapture felt.
This difficult ideal revivability is, however, more than compensated in the case of the emotions by a very easy actual revivability.
