That is, we can produce, not remembrances of the old grief or rapture, but new griefs and raptures, by summoning up a lively thought of their exciting cause.The cause is now only an idea, but this idea produces the same organic irradiations, or almost the same, which were produced by its original, so that the emotion is again a reality.We have 'recaptured'
it.Shame, love, and anger are particularly liable to be thus revived by ideas of their object.Professor Bain admits that "in their strict character of emotion proper, they have the minimum of revivability;
but being always incorporated with the sensations of the higher senses, they share in the superior revivability of sights and sounds." But he fails to point out that the revived sights and sounds may be ideal without ceasing to be distinct; whilst the emotion, to be distinct, must become real again.Prof.Bain seems to forget that an 'ideal emotion' and a real emotion prompted by an ideal object are two very different things.
An emotional temperament on the one hand, and a lively imagination for objects and circumstances on the other, are thus the conditions, necessary and sufficient, for an abundant emotional life.No matter how emotional the temperament may be, if the imagination be poor, the occasions for touching off the emotional trains will fail to be realized, and the life will be pro tanto cold and dry.This is perhaps a reason why it may be better that a man of thought should not have too strong a visualizing power.He is less likely to have his trains of meditation disturbed by emotional interruptions.It will be remembered that Mr.Galton found the members of the Royal Society and of the French Academy of Sciences to be below par in visualizing power.If I may speak of myself, I am far less able to visualize now, at the age of 46, than in my earlier years; and I am strongly inclined to believe that the relative sluggishness of my emotional life at present is quite as much connected with this fact as it is with the invading torpor of hoary eld, or with the omnibus-horse routine of settled professional and domestic life.I say this because I
occasionally have a flash of the old stronger visual imagery, and I notice that the emotional commentary, so to call it, is then liable to become much more acute than is its present wont.Charcot's patient, whose case is given above on p.58 ff., complained of his incapacity for emotional feeling after his optical images were gone.His mother's death, which in former times would have wrung his heart, left him quite cold; largely, as he himself suggests, because he could form no definite visual image of the event, and of the effect of the loss on the rest of the family at home.
One final generality about the emotions remains to be noted: They blunt themselves by repetition more rapidly than any other sort of feeling.This is due not only to the general law of 'accommodation'
to their stimulus which we saw to obtain of all feelings whatever, but to the peculiar fact that the 'diffusive wave' of reflex effects tends always to become more narrow.It seems as if it were essentially meant to be a provisional arrangement, on the basis of which precise and determinate reactions might arise.The more we exercise ourselves at anything, the fewer muscles we employ; and just so, the oftener we meet an object, the more definitely we think and behave about it; and the less is the organic perturbation to which it gives rise.The first time we saw it we could perhaps neither act nor think at all, and had no reaction but organic perturbation.
The emotions of startled surprise, wonder, or curiosity were the result.
Now we look on with absolutely no emotion. This tendency to economy in the nerve-paths through which our sensations and ideas discharge, is the basis of all growth in efficiency, readiness, and skill.Where would the general, the surgeon, the presiding chairman, be, if their nerve-currents kept running down into their viscera, instead of keeping up amid their convolutions? But what they gain for practice by this law, they lose, it must be confessed, for feeling.For the world-worn and experienced man, the sense of pleasure which he gets from the free and powerful flow of thoughts, overcoming obstacles as they arise, is the only compensation for that freshness of the heart which he once enjoyed.This free and powerful flow means that brain-paths of association and memory have more and more organized themselves in him, and that through them the stimulus is drafted off into nerves which lead merely to the writing finger or the speaking tongue. The trains of intellectual association, the memories, the logical relations, may, however, be voluminous in the extreme.
Past emotions may be among the things remembered.The more of all these trains an object can set going in us, the richer our cognitive intimacy with it is.This cerebral sense of richness seems itself to be a source of pleasure, possibly even apart from the euphoria which from time to time comes up from respiratory organs.If there be such a thing as a purely spiritual emotion, I should be inclined to restrict it to this cerebral sense of abundance and ease, this feeling, as Sir W.Hamilton would call it, of unimpeded and not overstrained activity of thought.Under ordinary conditions, it is a fine and serene but not an excited state of consciousness.In certain intoxications it becomes exciting, and it may be intensely exciting.I can hardly imagine a more frenzied excitement than that which goes with the consciousness of seeing absolute truth, which characterizes the coming to from nitrous-oxide drunkenness.Chloroform, ether, and alcohol all produce this deepening sense of insight into truth;
