Mental Development in the Child and the Race
Chapter 8: The Origins of Motor [1] Attitudes and Expressions
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§. 1. General View
IN ordinary usage, the word 'expression' stands for a passably definite thing. We mean, when we use it, to say that the signs, which we see in face, attitude, deportment, etc., of a man or beast, mean something; and that this meaning is what the mental process or state of the individual or creature under observation really is, or what he really intends to have us take his state to be. He expresses something to me when I gather from certain signs about his body, such as those I have mentioned, certain facts to be true about his mind or consciousness. The phrases, 'facial expression,' 'verbal and rhetorical expression,' 'emotional expression,' etc., all have this common idea at bottom.
Just as soon as we have come to ask how expression is possible, how it comes that these external signs can be trusted to convey the truth about the mind which lies within, we see that a whole philosophy of development is required to give us an answer; a philosophy of the development, that is, of mind and body together. It will not do to give an explanation simply of one mental state, like grief, expressing itself in one group of signs, like weeping; that might be solved by saying that the body had been created for just this use by the mind. But when we come to see that all possible mental states
(210) have their appropriate signs, all in a system, and that each animal consciousness has a system of signs, and all the same system, then we have to account not merely for the single cases, but for the system, as a system. And this is a very different matter.
Let us take, for example, the facts of suggestion as they have been set forth above. Suggestion we found to involve a gradual series of changes, transitions, stages, in the action, behaviour, attitudes of the child, according as he experiences changes, transitions, stages of treatment and stimulation from his surroundings. All his signs or expressions are very gradually formed out of previous signs. And no one of them can be understood except when considered in relation to those which went before. They all, in short, constitute a developing system and represent the mind also, as it is also considered as a developing system.
And, again, if we did not know beforehand how a particular experience would manifest itself in the system of signs, the signs simply as such would have no meaning whatever to us; they would not be signs of anything. Suppose I observe the movements of a complicated machine, going on in a series, -- a machine which I do not understand. Its movements are not signs or expressions to me of anything. They really are signs, however, expressions of the plan of action of the machine, stages in the idea or state of consciousness of the designer, which the machine embodies. And as soon as I understand the machine, which means as soon as I have the same state of consciousness or idea that he had, then the movements in their series or system do become signs, real expressions to me. I must be, then, actually introduced into the same system as the idea and the machine, in order to find what the expressions mean.
Looking at the child's expressions again, we see that they
(211) are expressions to us only because we are in the same system -- the human, the life system -- with the child. I have gone through the same systematic evolution of signs that he is going through. So the question of the origin of expression again widens itself out magnificently. It stands for an answer thus: not only why do the child's expressions -- mind and body together -- develop on such a system, but also why do all of us who understand the signs -- man, child, beast -- find ourselves in the same system of signs intelligible and usable by us all. How can we account for a great organic mind system in the world, and with it how account for its organic embodiment in the system of signs which we call expression?
This, it is evident, makes expression a function of organic evolution, and really identifies the science of expression with the great branch of biological science called Morphology. For signs of functions are always shapes of organs, temporary or permanent, and a system of shapes is always a system of permanent signs.
We must accordingly appeal to the theory of development to explain all expressions whatever.
Endnotes
- 'The word 'motor' is used to include the effects of 'efferent' process generally, not those of muscle contraction alone.
§ 2. The Theory of 'Emotional Expression'
Recent discussion has brought out certain great facts about the psycho-physics of emotion.
The outcome of discussion takes form about two or three general principles which I am now aiming to state in their general bearing upon the origin of 'expression' generally. It is evident that the word 'emotion ' may be used in two very distinct senses. Emotion may mean a phenomenon of instinct purely, the 'emotions' which a baby a year old has already got, such as fear, anger, jealousy, sympathy, etc.;
(212) or 'emotion' may designate a phenomenon of ideas -- something that the baby has yet to get, such as the emotions, or sentiments, which involve thought about things, contemplation, the more or less adequate understanding of the meanings of things in relation to the person who is affected. A child, for example, starts at a loud noise, and shows all the signs of the emotion of fear; but the adult fears a loud noise only when he has some reason to think that it means danger to him.
If this distinction be true, -- and no one denies the distinction in fact, apart from
the terms which have often hopelessly obscured it, -- it becomes evident that the question
as to what the components of emotional 'expression' are, is really a genetic question. All
the elements of the problem of the genesis of 'expressions' generally -- that is, of the
laws of motor development -- must be recognized and woven into an adequate theory.
And when we come to do this, two very important facts come before us, of which it is our duty to give some account. We have first to ask why each so-called emotion has the particular channels of 'expression,' or motor discharges, which it has; and second, how it comes that the same system of discharges or expressions answer for the two kinds of emotion which we have distinguished as, in one case, a phenomenon of instinct and, in the other case, a phenomenon of ideas. How is it that what I fear because I have some reasonable ground for fearing it, the child also fears by instinct, and that I make the same contractions, etc., in my state of fear that he does in his?
The first of these questions may be called the 'psychophysical' question of emotion. It asks how the mental state which we psychologists call emotion is actually related, in any particular case, to the movements, contractions, vaso-
(213)-motor changes, etc., which the body shows when it is 'expressing' this emotion. Does the mental State, the true emotion, come first, and itself cause the bodily expression, as we ordinarily seem to think? Or is the emotion itself the consciousness that these violent bodily changes are already taking place ? This is the problem which men are now discussing, and it is this which I wish to take up in the light of the principles of development which have been already laid out in the earlier pages. And we can ask ourselves the question in somewhat the following form, namely: How could what we know as emotion, together with what we know as emotional expression, have arisen in the course of development, and what does development teach us of the relation of these two things to each other ?
When, then, we come to take a broad survey of motor development, in the race no less than in the child, we are able to signalize certain great principles which we cannot do without: principles which stand out in biology and in psychology as essential to any theory of development. The whole range of facts fairly available for the genetic theory of emotion reactions should be brought under our three principles: Habit, used broadly to include the effects of inherited endowment, as illustrated by instinct, as well as acquired functions; Accommodation, the law of adaptation in all progressive evolution, no matter how adaptation is secured; and, earliest and most fundamental, Dynamogenesis, expressing the fact simply of regular connection between the sensory and motor sides of all living reactions, as to amount of process. These principles have already been given some notice. Let us see, therefore, how, if we assume that these three principles are all the 'rules of procedure' which the organism has to work under, -- how, then, emotion and its expression can have come to be.
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I. As for the fact of Dynamogenesis: what bearing has this principle upon the theory of
emotion? Much every way. We must bear in mind that this principle has always been acting,
and always is acting, in every reaction we make; that our reactions have grown to be what
they are in all cases by direct reflection of what we have received or experienced; that
just as certain as it is that we are experiencing new things every instant of our lives,
just so certain is it that we are expressing these new experiences in every action that we
make. Every one is familiar with Professor James's view that our minds never have just the
same contents twice over. Of course they do not. But the correlative fact has not had the
same recognition. If we never experience the same twice, so we never act the same
twice. The new x of content, added to the old c of content, must call out a
new x of action, added to the old a of action. If then our reaction is
always a + x, just as the content which it follows upon is c + x, then no
reaction is ever that and that only which is guaranteed by habit, inheritance, and what
not, in the past.
For it is easy to see that in every action of every organism at every stage of development there are two elements of discharge: an element due to habit solely, the discharges which are let loose by the old quantity of content into the pathways fixed by association, and then, second, an element of new discharge due to the new quantity of content.
With this distinction in mind, we come to ask whether emotion is present in this state of things. Suppose we are taking a particular instance of fear when we know that it is present, and then ask what factor in this whole state of central process the emotion really corresponds to. We find several possible answers.
The emotion may be said, in the terms of one possible answer, to be due to the presence of the new elements of
(215) content; to the commotion made by new presentations, images, play of thoughts, etc.; and the expression to be due to the passing off of this commotion to the muscles. The reply to this view seems easy when we remember that with the instinctive emotions, our case of the child's fear, it is a very old familiar thing, not a new thing at all, which excites the emotion; yet granted this, we still may say that the discharge due to the new elements of content in other cases of emotion, not so clearly instinctive, must, on our view of excess discharge, give some feeling of either pleasure or pain, and it is possible that the pleasure or pain tone of all but the instinctive emotions arises in this way. It may be an element in consciousness brought about by new accommodation conditions.
Yet this again may be disputed. One may admit the new element of discharge due to dynamogenesis, but then add a pertinent view. We may distinguish content + its expression, from consent + feeling of its expression; saying that there is no consciousness or feeling of the new element of motor process until it is itself reported as a new element of sensory content. Quite possible; it may be so, if the nervous system has developed that way. But we are convinced that it has not developed that way. We have found it necessary to hold that the pleasure represents the heightened organic process from which the excess discharge which issues in dynamogeny is itself released. Of course, as has been said above, the effect of the discharge in movement is reported back in a new element of pleasure or pain, but that is only claiming for it in turn an influence upon the vital processes whose condition is the sole direct ground of pleasure-pain consciousness.
So we may safely say as the result of the action of dynamogenesis that there is in all emotion -- as in every state
(216) of consciousness in which there are new elements of content -- a tingeing of pleasure or pain due to the presence of these new elements of content; and that there are in all actions, under the same conditions, new elements of discharge which give part of the movements involved in the so-called expression of that state of consciousness.
II. With this result well in mind, let us inquire more fully into the influence of the second of our principles, Habit.
It is now evident that a motor reaction of any kind has always two stimulating antecedents: one the influence fixed by habit, and the other the influence of the new elements of content presented by the environment. But we know that habit tends to make reactions automatic and reflex; and that consciousness tends to evaporate from such reactions. As I put it long ago, "psychologically, it [Habit] means loss of oversight, diffusion of attention, subsiding consciousness." [1] Hence we must admit that those actions most dominated by habit -- the smoothest and most instinctive -- have least consciousness in their carrying out. And, on the other hand, where habit is least influential, where the content is largely new, where the pleasure or pain of its assimilation is great, there attention and effort are strained, there excitement runs high. In all these cases the stimulating influence is new, one which has not yet been brought under the influence of habit, and so one which adds a new dynamogenic quality to the reaction.
It turns out, however, that just those 'expressive' reactions which are most instinctive and reflex (fear, anger, joy, etc.) really do carry with them most of the consciousness which we call emotion -- certainly vivid and disturbed enough. What then shall we say? Either that there are really present other new elements of content additional to the
(217) regular antecedents of the reflex; or that the emotion is not the antecedent of the expression at all, but that the reverse is true -- the emotion is consequent upon the expression. We cannot hold to the former alternative. Where are the adequate stimulants in conscious content, new or old, to the newly hatched chick's wild fear of the hawk ? [2] So we must take the other alternative, and hand over all this class of reactions to the theory which holds that the emotion, so far as it has fixed instinctive forms of expression, follows upon the expression. I have no hesitation, therefore, in adopting the 'effect' theory of emotion recently announced by Lange and James as regards inherited emotional expression excited by constant definite objects of presentation.
Emotion is, on this view, therefore, no exception to our law of ontogenetic growth: the
law that that which is habitual is carried out with least consciousness. The high
consciousness in emotion is a reflex effect. But we would expect, on the other hand, that
in all the ideal states of mind, in all the new complications of content to which the
attention has to get adjusted, in all emotional states which do not attach immediately and
unreflectively to conscious
r objects of presentation, -- that in all these cases the exciting influence should have
the dynamogenic effect already noted, and so give elements of expression over and above
the reactions due to habit.
Reverting, now, to our fancied situation, a state of emotion in actual operation, we find that we have made certain simplifications. The pleasure or pain of it is, at least in part, due to the presence of new elements in the object which causes the emotion; the expression of it is due, at least in part, to the new discharges let loose by the central process corre-
(218)-sponding to this pleasure or pain; the expression is further due, certainly in part, to old reactions or habits of movement which have become common in the presence of this object or others of its class; and the quality of the emotion, the character it has as making it different from other emotions, is due, certainly in part, to the feeling of these factors of the expression actually taking place. So far, then, we have accounted for something of the pleasure or pain of an emotion, something of its expression, and something of its peculiar quality or character. Can we do more? Let us see what we can get out of our third principle, 'Accommodation.'
III. The law of Accommodation has appeared to us to be operative in two ways: first, as expressing the mode of each new adaptation under the action of dynamogenesis, -- the organism adapts itself by the selection, from excess discharges, of movements fittest to aid vitality, -- this is one aspect of accommodation; and it also secures by the action of association, the repetition and permanent fixing of the fittest movements in great habits which are the regular utility reactions, reflexes, instincts, fixed expressions, etc., of the organism, -- this is the other aspect of accommodation. Now, the bearing of the second of these aspects of accommodation on the theory of emotion gives us great expectations at once, for it enables us to bring into its complex conditions all of the organic and mental elements which are regularly associated with those factors already pointed out. Let us look a little at details.
We found that a new object served to bring new vitality conditions, new pleasure or pain, new movements by dynamogenesis. But these new elements only get fixed for recurrence as they fit into old adjustments, causing differentiations of them. This means that the new gets associated with the old; so that when it comes again, all the old which
(219) its presence touched on the former occasion now clusters to the front in company with it. I tremble and fly at the sight of a lion, because he reminds me of a lion's power and disposition; and my attitudes in the presence of such formidable creatures are those of trembling and flight. So, in brief, we have a great mass of associated elements, both of content and of movement, rushing into consciousness in consequence of every new adjustment, and in addition to its present intrinsic motor and emotional value. This gives more quality and more pleasure or pain to the state of emotion.
This principle applies directly, also, to all the organic, visceral, conęsthetic, sensations so vividly present and soulfilling in many emotions. All habitual reactions in states of emotion, as they become more reflex, and hence less conscious in their actual carrying out, yet come to give, nevertheless, by their return wave upon consciousness, overpowering floods of organic sensation. I think it is due to the fact that it is by muscular movements of excess with accommodation, by violent, often long-continued, protective or offensive reactions, that violent pleasure and pain conditions of vitality were originally reflected in action, in the history of animal life. This exhaustive muscular process taxed for its maintenance all the organic processes, -- heart, lungs, etc., -- so that a great mass of organic sensations were thrown into consciousness, and by unbroken association came to stand themselves, in union with muscular sensations, for the damaging or beneficial kinds of stimulation that at first excited pleasure or pain, even when the object actually present has no intrinsic emotional value. And so far as they were themselves vitalizing or devitalizing, they are directly hedonic, and so go on to increase their own good or bad effect. It is thus probable that in our more violent organic reactions in emotion, often pathological, the organ-
(220)-ism is exhibiting the wear and tear of the long processes of offence or defence that animal forms were accustomed to go through when they met the objects which now tend to excite these emotions and sensations in us.
This element explains most of the grosser part of the 'emotional expression.' This reflex flood explains most of the quality and much of the pleasure and pain of those emotions which have instinctive expression. So far, then, the body of emotion is largely filled up with consciousness of habitual actions actually shooting off, these habits being, in their origin and gradual formation in evolution, selections, all the way through, from excess reactions springing from varying vital conditions. Certain laws of their development have been formulated by Darwin and others; laws which answer the great question why a particular emotion is present when particular bodily attitudes, vaso-motor changes, visceral sensations, are also present. This I speak of further below.
And the other aspect of the principle of accommodation lets in more light on emotion. In this aspect of accommodation -- named first in order above -- we find the sphere of new adjustments secured by the constant modification and differentiation of old ones. There is a great field of such accommodation in the fact and function of attention, a thing of such clear mental value and such wide bearings that special sections are devoted below [3] to its rise and development. Here and now I can only assume what is there argued for, and note the relation of the attention, considered as mental function of accommodation, to emotion.
Consciousness, we have seen, is the new thing in nature -- the thing by which organisms show in all cases their latest and finest adjustments. And the central fact of conscious-
(221)-ness, its prime instrument, its selective agent, its seizing, grasping, relating, assimilating, apperceiving -- in short' its accommodating element and process -- is attention. This all current psychology admits. And the psychology which is aware of its genetic problems will also admit a further point; this -- that in the life of the higher organisms, such as preeminently human life, the mind has superseded all other agencies and processes in aiding and securing adjustments to environment. If these two things be admitted, -- the points, to repeat, that mind is nature's great accommodating agent, and that attention is mind's great accommodating agent, -- then it follows that the law of accommodation must get its application almost exclusively, in higher organisms, in connection with acts of attention.
Now in the later chapter referred to, it is claimed, with some indications of proof, that attention is simply the form which the 'excess' process, found in our earlier discussions to be the means of all organic accommodation, has taken on in habitual connection with memory, imagination, and thought. The attention process is a motor reaction, involving all the elements of such reactions to a mental content, as these reactions have become, by habit, crystallized in certain fixed forms of vaso-motor change, muscular contraction, etc. Just what elements are involved in it -- that comes up later. Here we assume this doctrine of attention, and go on to ask its relation to our present topic, emotion.
We see at the outset that if attention is the habitual form of mental accommodation, what we have said about the factors found in lower emotion -- the factors all of which are genetic elements present together, heightened dynamogenesis, reflex feelings of discharge, associated organic disturbances flooding consciousness -- must be true also of attention.
(222)That is, every act of attention must give all these factors in kind, but on a higher level -- a level at which the stimulus which claims attention is now a mental image, a memory, an idea.
We should have heightened dynamogenesis, looking at the matter in some detail, first felt as pleasure and pain in the activity of attention itself in receiving, holding, using new ideas. This is just what psychology does find and calls 'ideal' pleasure and pain; and it is the basis of the doctrine of Ward and the Herbartians that the play of ideas is the locus of all hedonic consciousness. Ideal pleasure, simply as such, abstracted -- as of course in fact it cannot be -- from all qualities in the content is, on the physical side, heightened nervous process in the organic seat of the higher content attended to. It is just the same, for ideas, that lower pleasure is for sensation contents.
Second, we ought to have certain qualitative elements brought into consciousness from the habitual contractions, etc., of attention itself; the attention is, in large part, certain constant reflex contractions -- of brow, and glottis, movements of skin of skull, etc., together with the organic sensations from the vital processes associated with these. This is again so evidently the case, that we find certain qualities of feeling, called 'emotions of function,' connected with movements of the attention: the sense of contraction or expansion, of fatigue, of effort, of freshness, of curiosity, of interest, etc.
Then, third, a true analysis of attention shows that there are certain refinements of attention, whereby the elements which go to make it up vary very markedly according to the character of the idea or object attended to. There is visual attention to visual ideas, and auditory attention to auditory ideas, motor attention to ideas of movement, etc., each made
(223) up of its own refined system of contractions and organic effects, inside of the wider circle of contractions and effects which make them all acts of attention in the generic sense. Now, in so far as these smaller refinements of effect get themselves grouped into relatively independent habits, just so far they contribute new quality to the whole psychosis which the given object or idea, claiming the attention at the moment, wraps about itself. And these constitute the higher qualities, emotional states which we call sentiments, higher feelings, the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious, etc. [4]
The theory of development, in short, requires that we distinguish the hedonic from the qualitative element in higher emotion. Intellect could not have developed in the first place, nor have become the magnificent engine of organic accommodation, through volition, which it is, if intellectual, ęsthetic, and ethical pleasures were only the resonance of instinct reflexes. Yet even here the qualitative marks, the kind of excitement, the main psychosis apart from the pleasures and pains of new apprehensions, knowledges, curiosities, are just as surely, and for the same genetic reasons, the resonance of instinct reflexes as are the gross fixed expressions of anger, fear, etc., in animals.
So, taking stock of our net outcome, we find that our principles of development have, assuming the development itself, told us to expect groups of elements in consciousness at certain stages of evolution. And when we come to examine and analyze consciousness at these stages, we find that these elements so grouped are just what we ordinarily lump together and call emotion. And the predominance of one or other element in a marked degree in a particular case is entirely
(224) the ground of difference between this case and others, and is entirely a phenomenon of relative development. The infant, and the animal which has not that highest engine of accommodation, -- attention, -- have the reflex, habit-born, organic thing called, it is true, emotion; but its quality is 'rank,' unreasonable, urgent, a matter of nerves and instinct. And that is all the infant has, except the pleasures and pains which are also sensations, or quales of sensation.
But the man -- the child plus mind -- has the higher agent of accommodation, attention, and that supreme form of attention called volition; his emotion has added elements, not different in kind' but only in level, and in relative freedom from the grosser implications of organic habit. He has refined emotions about his thoughts, his ideas, his ideals, his duties, his gods.
My conclusion, then, is that emotion is, in all cases, this: pleasure and pain of accommodation, plus pleasure and pain of habit, plus a certain lot of qualities contributed to consciousness by more or less habitual processes of muscle, organ, and gland, going on at the time.
And the expression of emotion is, in all cases, this: certain more or less habitual processes going on in the organism, plus elements of muscular and bodily contraction due to present pleasure and pain. That is all. [5]
Endnotes
- Feeling and Will, p. 49.
- This illustration may still serve, although Professor Ll. Morgan finds no such congenital fear-reaction in the chick.
- Below, Chap. X., § 3, and Chap. XV.
- The reader may consult the classification and treatment of the emotions given in my Handbook of Psychology, Vol. II., Chaps. VIII. ff.
- A partial development of this general view, with special reference to current theories of emotion, is to be found in my article, 'The Origin of Emotional Expression,' in The Psychological Review, 1., November, 1894, p. 610. I am glad to say that my conclusions are very near to those reached, by analysis, by William James in his latest formulation (see the same Review, I., September, 1894, p. 516); conclusions which, I think, are not just the same as those of the chapter on 'Emotion,' in his Principles of Psychology. Certain cases of the rise and progress of emotion in the child -- its ontogenesis -- are treated in detail, in addition to what is said in Chap. XI., § 3, below, in the volume of Social and Ethical Interpretations.
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§ 3. Hedonic Expression and its Law
In the preceding section of this chapter we found two questions implicated in this matter of expression: one of them we have now attempted to answer, that which concerns itself with the psycho-physics of emotion as a phenomenon of consciousness taken generally. We now come to the second question. It brings up for our consideration the fact of particular expressions as attaching to particular emotional states, and asks how it is that each such particular instance of organic and muscular expression could have arisen and come to be what it is.
It has become evident that the general principles of development apply to all expressions, and that in explaining any particular case we have only to ask what aspect of development is predominantly concerned. At the same time it must be equally true that all such aspects, however we may find it necessary to consider them as separate principles to explain different classes of phenomena, must nevertheless have their common basis in the one original fact of contractility, with the modifications and adjustments which it undergoes in evolution.
Now it has become plain that all motor-discharge, so far as it is differentiated at all, gets to be so as an index of waxing and waning life processes of nutrition, etc. And we have seen that the waxing and the waning must have been equally original wherever life was present at all. This waxing and waning life process must reflect itself in the movements of the organism, giving two great types of movement in all life, however low in the biological scale. And we have found it possible, in the examination of higher forms of life in which consciousness with pleasure and pain are clearly present, to
(226) classify the organic manifestations correlative to pleasure and pain under a similar twofold effect on organic and muscular movement. So it has been simply the logic of [act which has led us to say that this twofold type of movement, showing relative vitality in lower organisms and relative pleasure in the higher, is one and the same phenomenon; and that even in the lowest forms of life, waxing and waning vital processes are to be considered as the physiological analogue of the pleasure-pain consciousness.
In this fundamental division of movements, therefore, expansions, heightened motor energy, and excess discharge, on the one hand, and contractions, lowered energy, inhibited discharge, on the other hand, we have what I venture to call 'hedonic expression,' with the law of its twofold manifestation. Inside of this all further differentiations of movement must arise as special adaptations. It remains to examine them further with a view to the understanding of their rise; and in connection with them further light may be expected upon this general condition of them.
§ 4. Habitual Motor Attitudes
I. The teleology of all special adaptations of movement -- the reason for their existence, the end which they would have in view provided they could think and speak -- now becomes plainer than it was before. This end is not in any sense expression. The organism has no special tendency to show itself off, no means of acquiring systems of 'signs' to show what is in consciousness beforehand. The only such signs are these very typical differences of movement which correspond to waxing and waning vitality -- to pleasure and pain. These are expressive because, and only because, they are different, and so reflect differences in the processes which
(227) issue in them. The subsequent modifications of movement of any and of every kind, have quite a different origin. They have in view the adaptation of the organism ;n further detail to the conditions under which the life process exists. Their end, each of them, is to keep up the stimulations which secure the waxing, and to avoid those which bring about the waning of life. How can they be expressions of what is not yet secured or avoided ? Of course, all movements which do secure one of these ends, and so become fixed as habits in the organism, may and do then become signs of the effects on the organism which it is their office to secure, and we may then reverse the order of rise of the two factors and consider, for convenience, the life-process cause and the movements which are really means to it, effect. This is what the phrase ' emotional expression' does. But the 'expressions' of emotion, as we have already seen, are -- apart from the dynamogenic issue of pleasure and pain -- not caused by the emotion at all. The emotion is the outcome of them.
As far, therefore, as there is any true expression, as far as there are any movements which are really in their origin the characteristic outcome of what is beforehand in the mind, it is all summed up in the one antithesis with which life begins: that between organic and vital expansion as expressing pleasure, and organic and vital depression as expressing pain.
This may be put in the general statement already made, that all expression, properly so-called, is hedonic expression, which is the reflection, in the organic and muscular functions, of the relative influence of experience of any kind upon the vitality of the organism. It comes vividly before us in detail in the later chapter on 'Organic Imitation,' a phrase which simply serves to indicate the general method by which,
(228) through this one form of expression, the organism works its new adaptations.
The particular organic and muscular states which are associated with the emotions, such as fear, anger, etc., and called popularly their expression, must have arisen not, as we now see, as expressions of anything, but as co-ordinations and associations of reactions which proved useful to the organism in maintaining and improving its vitality. All of them, then, were originally utility reactions, and arose each in its place, and the system of them as a whole, as special adaptations. They fall under the theory of adaptation and exhibit particular instances of it.
So the question of the rise of these groups of movement takes a new form, and its answer comes to require that each such so-called expression shall be shown in its origin to have been useful to the organism in certain conditions of its environment.
This detailed inquiry evidently belongs to the general theory of organic evolution. Darwin has himself examined the various instinctive 'expressions' in detail, [1] and proved, beyond a question, that most of them were originally useful ways of reacting in the storm and stress of maintaining, defending, and extending life. Further aid in this tracing of the evolution of expression has been afforded by those investigators who have analyzed the anatomical and physiological conditions of many such groups of effects.[2]
The results of their work have not been entirely successful, however, as concerns details; since there has always remained over a residue of well-marked effects, accompanying equally well-marked emotional states, which could not be shown to have been useful to man or animal. Darwin himself for-
(229)-mulated the principle which states the one real organic requirement, namely, the utility of a group of movements in the life history of the organism. But he did not stop here. He found it necessary to place beside this principle certain others, which served to explain the cases to which the utility formula could not be made to apply.
Darwin's principle of 'serviceable associated habits,' however, is all that the case really demands when we come to get an adequate view of the process of development. It is now my aim to show that the theory of development stated in earlier pages of this book enables us to restate the results of Darwin's work, so as to include all cases under the one great principle of 'serviceable associated habit,' taken together with that of 'hedonic expression' already explained.
II. The series of facts which gave Darwin greatest trouble are those which he gathered together under his 'law of antithesis': cases of animal attitudes in certain emotional situations, which seemed to be capable of serving no useful purpose of any kind to the animal, but which were very clearly just the reverse of other attitudes, which went with the opposite emotions and were evidently useful in connection with those emotions. For example, -- to cite one of the cases so powerfully illustrated in the photographic copies reproduced in Darwin's book, -- a dog in anger strikes certain attitudes of defence, such as general rigidity of muscle, high back, bristling of hair, retracted lip, forward ears, etc., -- all of direct use in a fight with his enemy. But the dog's attitudes when he feels friendly and welcomes his master are just the reverse -- general limbering of muscles, flexible turnings of body, lowering of back, fawning, backing of ears, close-lying hair, etc. The emotion is antithetic, so the expression is also; that is the only reason, practically, which Darwin could give for the animal's attitude in the second case.
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There are a great many such instances in the series of emotional attitudes in animals and
man. But we have only to state the principle of antithesis clearly, to see that it is no
principle at all, unless we hold that the emotion causes the expression. And even then, we
are no better off, I think. For we still have to ask why the emotions themselves are
different. This, we have seen, we can only answer by saying that they are different
because the movements have been different by which the organism got itself adjusted to the
particular objects, etc., giving these several emotions. We come, that is, back to
movements again, and have to explain why, in these cases, the movements are antithetical.
Darwin himself is as modest here as elsewhere, and only says that it is natural that opposite mental states should be associated with opposite physical states. But there is no reason, so far, that they should in fact. Darwin here makes, quite unconsciously, an incursion into the field of popular fallacy and of Hegelian logic. It is a perfect nightmare, -- which should be left to the Hegelians to revel in, -- this reading into nature of opposites to all her facts, simply because the mind's forms of thinking go by contraries. Why, if showing the fangs aids an animal when he fights, should covering them aid him when he loves? His teeth are involved in one case, but not in the other. If rigid length aids him in standing up against his enemy in a fight, why should contortions be indulged in when he sees a friend ?
The only general fact which in advance seems to make these antitheses likely, is the arrangement of the muscles, whereby they go in pairs, called 'antagonists.' Each muscle of such a pair is held in control by the other; and whichever contracts, the other is involved in some kind of an oppo-
(231)-site contraction; so it is easy to say that when consciousness is in a State which represents the stimulation of one muscle, it is only to be expected that the passage of consciousness into an opposite state will not only release the one muscle, but, by a kind of organic rebound, stimulate the antagonist. This is physiological and true; but it still in no way explains the origin of different contrary attitudes; for it is a main task of the theory of development to explain just this arrangement of the muscles. How does it come that there are antagonistic muscles ? What uses called them into being? For the muscular system has developed by use and fitness. Once answer this by showing the practical use of both muscles of each pair of antagonists, and we can then explain both the fact that attitudes are antithetic, and the further fact that opposite emotions are there with them. For we have seen that it is the muscular and organic attitudes and associations which give quality to the emotions.
It becomes necessary, therefore, to completely reverse the popular conception of antithetical expression and Darwin's conception also, as far as he leaves the facts which he so adequately describes, and shares in the theory that an emotion causes its so-called expression. We must find in our theory of development by means of detailed motor adaptations, ground for the origin of a muscular system which works by antithesis of push and pull, forward and backward, contraction and relaxation, antagonism, in short; and with it the detailed differences among these attitudes themselves, which correspond to differences in emotions, as we actually find them in our experience.
The latter task is largely a matter of detailed examination and classification of the various muscular groups found in the different emotions. This has been done with some success for many emotions. I shall not attempt to take this
(232) farther here. The genetic problem, however, the rise of antagonism, is a further question to set before us.
It has doubtless occurred to readers of the two preceding chapters, what account is possible of the rise of muscular and emotional antagonism. The facts of organic gain and loss, contraction and expansion, pleasure and pain, have already cost us so many words that it tends to come to mind at once as an explanation of the fact of antithetic expression. What has been said of hedonic expression, recognizing it as the only expression as such, leads us to expect a great division among states of consciousness with respect to their hedonic colouring as pleasurable or painful. If organic life has from the start manifested itself in two forms of movement, and if all new adjustments have been effected inside of this fundamental bifurcation, then of course the muscular system, in its development, must take on the form of a series of organs fitted to carry this original antithesis into all the details of life. This is exactly the account which must be given of the rise of the muscular system, with its pairs of antagonists. The muscles represent special habits and combinations of movements fitted either to close up upon and hold stimulations, or to draw away from and escape them; and these are antithetic ways of behaviour.
It is evident, however, that this explanation of antithetic functions was not possible on the old theory of the nature of emotion, the theory that the emotions are so many distinct mental acts or functions which 'express' themselves outwards in the muscles. For expressions of such a kind might just as well as not come into opposition with hedonic expression, or they might clash with the reactions most useful for the organism in relation to its environment, or, again, they might, by their cross currents, prevent the development of a
(233) muscular system on any consistent plan. The old view gave rise to all kinds of dualisms; the dualism between pleasure pain and emotion being most of all invited. [3]
It is the force of such a criticism, implicitly felt rather than clearly recognized, that has led so many psychologists to claim that emotion is only a compounded state of pleasures or pains, a position which well deserves the description given it by James: [4] "This is a hackneyed psychological doctrine, but on any theory of the seat of emotion it seems to me one of the most artificial and scholastic of the untruths that disfigure our science. One might as well say that the essence of prismatic colour is pleasure and pain."
This view of antithetical reactions is also impossible on the current biological theories of development; that is, either on the theory that accounts for all development by compounded repetitions of reactions, alone, or on the more psychological theory going by the names of Spencer and Bain. For this view requires us to recognize an original tendency of organic forms to react in two antithetical ways with reference to stimulations which give the two original vital effects corresponding to pleasure and pain; and that none of the earlier theories do give this recognition, is shown in an earlier place. Darwin held -- as far as he took up the theory of ontogenetic adaptation, as I think he nowhere did explicitly -- the ordinary biological doctrine of adaptation by chance repetition and compounding of movements which proved themselves useful; so of course he was unable to see any real reason for the existence of systems of move-
(234) ments to which no special utility in race history could be assigned. [5]
Our conclusion, then, in regard to antithetical attitudes,
(235) is that antithesis is a fundamental fact of hedonic expression; and as hedonic expression is the only real expression' the principle of antithesis becomes' everywhere in motor development, the one law of expression. The other principle, already mentioned, of Darwin's, that of 'serviceable associated habits,' is, on the other hand, the one principle also in its sphere; but its sphere is not expression, -- its sphere is motor adaptation. All adaptations whatever -- except the first great division of movements in accordance with the law of antithesis -- are 'serviceable associated habits,' or 'utility reactions.'
Consequently we may say that in any organic attitude whatever, the case is the same as we found it to be, in the earlier section, in emotional attitudes. There is the real expression factor, the new hedonic element, issuing in new antithetical phases, by the law of dynamogenesis; and there is, besides, the quality as such, the differencing 'feel' of the attitude accomplished, with its habitual pleasure or pain, and all the organic associations, which are in all cases due to the reflex, consolidated, instinctive, sometimes pathological, habits of action originally useful.
Mr. Darwin also finds it necessary to recognize another class of facts which he is unable to bring under either of the foregoing principles, facts which he puts together under the so-called principle of 'direct nervous discharge.' He finds over and above the movements which show reactions useful to the creature or to his ancestors, and also over and above the movements antithetical to the foregoing, certain movements of the animal which appear as such to follow no law. This very fact of lawlessness, overflow, accidental issuing of the stimulating process right out into the muscular and organic systems, is expressed by the phrase 'direct nervous
(236) discharge'; all it means, therefore, as a principle, is that we are dealing with phenomena of stimulation and reaction. Such cases are one's convulsive movements when in a dentist's chair, the jumping and clapping of hands of a child's glee, the lawless gambolling of playful lambs, and the skittishness of a horse on a cold day, -- movements which are not just alike in any two creatures, nor just alike in any two experiences of the same creature, -- and with it all, various general effects, such as trembling, shivering, fainting in fright, flushing in joy, blushing in shame, glandular secretions, variations in heart action, etc., some of them positively harmful to the organism.
This class of phenomena -- facts which Darwin found no use for in the economy of organic development -- are, from the point of view of our theory, most instructive and valuable as evidence. They give, to my mind, very direct proof of the main thesis respecting the method of organic adaptation. This we may see on closer examination, although the points are in the main so evident that the exposition may seem tiresome.
We have found that increased vital energies tend to produce heightened or excessive motor processes, -- Spencer's 'heightened discharge,' Bain's 'accompaniment of pleasure.' We have found that this and its opposite, lowered vitality, express themselves in antithetical movements, expansions and contractions, advancing and retreating, etc. Again, we have found that it is from these antithetical movements that all further adjustments or adaptations are effected by 'functional selection,' those movements of either kind which are useful being retained as permanent utility reactions. And this scheme of course assumes the constant presence, at every stage of animal development, of the excess discharge -- the 'hedonic expression' of an earlier section.
(237)
Further, the characteristics of movements which represent unutilized vital and nervous
overflow are plain enough. They should be very diffuse, indefinite, purposeless, highly
toned by pleasure or pain; diffuse, because they arise from central processes of such
intensity as to overflow the ordinary motor channels already fixed by heredity and habit;
indefinite, because so soon as they do get for themselves fixed ways of discharge,
representing in any sense an accommodation of the organism to the stimulations which call
them out, then at once they fall into another category, that of 'serviceable associated
habit'; purposeless, because they represent excess energy over and above the regular
expenditures called for by habitual purposive reactions; and highly toned, because their
rise is itself a phenomenon of those vital conditions which lie at the basis of the
hedonic consciousness.
Now these are just the characters which Darwin and other writers attach to the movements which illustrate his principle of 'direct nervous discharge.'
It is only, therefore, a step to the conclusion that in these movements we have, running through all life phenomena, high and low, the evidence of the excess processes, and their reverse, required by the theory of development. These are just the material from which new adjustments are made.[7] Certain of these 'direct discharges' happen to do something for the organism which it never succeeded in doing before; this secures pleasure or removes pain, and by the law of increased discharge through the same or associated channels, these movements pass over to the reign of the law of 'serviceable associated habits'; but with it all, the issue in movement of the increased vital and pleasure processes due to success, has again recruited or depleted the excess discharge. So the 'circular process' goes on.
(238) We should find, however, that movements of this class are not quite lawless, nor purposeless. If I am right in finding that they are reactions in states of waxing and waning vitality, -- that they constitute just the hedonic expression, the only expression, properly speaking, which an organism has, -- then they should of course express something. They should partake directly in the characters found to mark off all antithetic movements. Movements which accompany highly pleasure-toned psychoses should be expansive, forward, outward, exciting; but besides, they should carry with them all the characteristic utility reactions which are already associated with pleasurable experiences. Movements, on the other hand, which accompany highly pain-toned psychoses, should be contractile, inward, repressing, and should carry along with them, besides, all the attitudes regularly associated with painful experiences.
Now I submit that the close observation of these confused -- convulsive, if you will -- sets of movement, do show this antithesis to a very marked degree. When they accompany pleasures they are found to involve not only those quite purposeless movements which simply mean diffused overflow of energy, but they show, moreover, two very clear kinds of utility reaction also. First, in excessive joy, we find not only the tremblings, weepings, heart-beatings, and muscle-twitchings, but also the usual habitual signs of joy which all pleasurable experiences show -- the laugh, the facial expression, the voice tones, the bodily attitudes; and, further, certain tensions and movements of very evident utility, in grasping, retaining, coming-up-to-for-further-possession, etc., found in attitudes of welcome generally. And on the other hand, in connection with the random movements shown in violent painful emotion, we find as well two classes of habitual attitudes: first, those of organic and vital depression, felt
(239) as faintness, paralysis, sweating, etc.; and second, attitudes and acts of rebellion' defence, escape-by-removal from stimulation, such as frowning, setting teeth. And the two systems of attitudes characteristic of pleasure are, in general, antithetic to those characteristic of pain.
In fact, so clear is it that these 'direct' movements are limiting processes to the ordinary antithetic attitudes, that we are able to look upon them as end-terms each in a series which recapitulates organic growth with all its perturbations. Pleasure begins by bringing out the reactions which are oldest in race utility, then as it is continued or increased, those of newer formation and less universality, then those peculiar to the individual, and finally, at the limit of duration or excess of intensity, the purposeless convulsive and random movements of Darwin. And pain proceeds by a similar series of manifestations -- tracing reversely the series of adjustments acquired in race and individual history, the whole series being antithetic, in its great features, to the corresponding series of pleasure attitudes. [8]
There is also another principle clearly, although inadequately, recognized by Darwin, which may now be brought out; the principle made more of in James's discussion under the phrase 'principle of analogous feeling stimuli.' Darwin added a clause to his statement of the law of 'serviceable associated habit,' which brings under it a great class of seemingly useless muscular movements. He says: " We have now, I think, sufficiently shown the truth of our first principle, namely, that when any sensation, desire, dislike, etc., has led during a long series of generations to some voluntary movement, then a tendency to the performance of a similar movement will almost certainly be excited, whenever the same or any analo-
(240)-gous or associated sensation, etc., although very weak, is experienced, notwithstanding that the movement in this case may not be of the least use" (italics mine). And he continues a little further on: "When we treat of the special expressions of man, the latter part of our first principle will be seen to hold good, namely, that when movements, associated through habit with certain states of mind, are partially repressed by the will, the strictly involuntary muscles, as well as those which are least under separate control of the will, are liable still to act; and their action is often highly expressive. Conversely, when the will is temporarily or permanently weakened, the voluntary muscles fail before the involuntary." [9] The latter quotation may be taken to be the citation from the voluntary life of an instance of the principle that similar or 'analogous feeling' stimuli tend to bring, in whole or part, by complication, semi-inhibition, or lack of inhibition, the reactions in movement which are habitual and useful in connection with the stimuli which they resemble.
This series of facts, which are, in the sequel, of the first importance for mental development, are of especial interest here, as showing the relation of the theory of development now explained to the older purely biological theory. The latter, it will be remembered, finds the exclusive cause of development in repetitions of reactions, under complicated conditions which force a crossing or compounding of paths, in such a way that each single movement, in response to each single stimulus, tends to lose its identity, and to become part of a larger discharge, which issues in a group of movements coordinated for a larger use and function. The conception of how this compounding takes place in the organism is a purely mechanical conception; a process of the draining of energies, first in the channels which are largest, most permeable, and
(241) most practiced, and then into those less and less so; the whole group being called out on later occasions, as a group, so far as any stimulus, which the organism gets, starts the central energies into channels adequate to effect the discharge as a whole.
Now this conception of growing complexity, or co-ordination in reactions, is quite in order still, on our theory of adaptation, and it is indeed even more reasonable than before. Just in so far as the organism has a means of its own of selecting, duplicating, or maintaining, its stimulations, by adapted movements, as the 'circular' process enables it to do, just in so far is a premium put upon the speedy fixing of great drainage channels representing these particular adapted movements. And, further, just so far is there created the tendency of other, accidental and more trivial, useful or useless, processes, to drain off into these great channels. It is only an instance of this that the child learns with such remarkable speed to make great happy adjustments, each. then leading to a number of smaller adjustments. The early start which all organisms have in the antithesis between the two classes of movements which express waxing and waning vitality, and hedonic contrasts, all in one -- this secures a splendid organic tendency directly in the lines of discharge which smaller special adjustments need to issue in, and which but for this preparation beforehand, the smaller ones would have to make by actual compounds among themselves.
In interpreting this process more closely, in the life history of organisms, two aspects of it rise to claim special remark -- aspects which break into psychology as analogies, or explanations, of far-reaching application, as will appear later on.
In the first place, there is at every stage of development in the animal series, a certain mass of normal process, 'set for good,' so to speak, which the creature brings to his experiences
(242) at birth. It may be thought of, functionally, as a tendency, of the organism as a whole, called its 'hereditary impulse,' to take a given course of development, which will in a measure recapitulate the course of organic development antecedent to this particular stage; and also as a tendency of the individual creature to acquire actions of particular kinds with great facility, by reason of these native organic pathways of discharge. The most marked instances of this latter are the instincts; but the tendency is equally present to the performance of functions not so completely handed over to nervous habit, but still requiring consciousness and somewhat gradual learning; such as speech, standing, walking, thumb-grasping, etc.
Now with reference to the influence of these innate tendencies, it is easy to see that everything which the organism does will tend to conform itself if possible to them. New processes of stimulation will set their discharges toward these old channels. Old ways of action will try to serve as adequate responses to new sets of conditions. To deny this is to say that the organism can simply create new habits for itself at the call of any stimulus from without. If the organism is one, then any new process must fight for its life, especially for its life of action. For a genetic view requires us to hold that there is no part of an organism, no muscles, no pathways, but those which have arisen for a use; so if a new thing is to be learned, it must resist the old ways of action and supersede the old ways of use, by overcoming the impulse which already urges the organism on, or it must itself accept and subsidize the old channels and muscles, and conform, as far as may be, to their previous habits of action.
This latter is the dominating result. All new experiences tend to lapse into old ones, to be in their effects on the organism identical with them, to have their differences rubbed
(243) off, and so to discharge through pathways used by the old ones.
This is a necessary result of an adequate view of the rise of neurological habits; and we will see below that psychology directly and imperatively confirms it. The principle of Assimilation, treated in a later connection,[10] is a direct reflection in consciousness of this aspect of the law of habit. And this is only to say, as Darwin said, that we ought to find, in certain states of mind, attitudes struck which have arisen, not for use in this condition of mind, but in conditions of mind which feel like it in any respect. But the two processes do not discharge the same way because they feel alike; on the contrary, their feeling alike is the sense that their discharge is the same way. The attitudes are useful in connection with the earlier stimulations, and for their sakes they arose; but they are also used by these other central processes, which thus come to be 'analogous feeling stimuli' for consciousness. So a great mass of apparently useless processes fall after all under the law of 'serviceable habits.'
But we have not yet got all the light we may -- and it turns out to be psychological light in the sequel -- from the consideration of these processes of compounding in the nervous organism. There is another great way of looking at the facts. The use of a given system of pathways and muscles for the discharge of certain processes which are different from those for which the pathways and muscles originally arose, -- this amounts, it is evident, to a great series of possible substitutions of processes one for another in the chain of events which a given issue of movement represents. Suppose, in accordance with the principle of 'analogous feeling stimuli,' I make a wry face at my physician, because the sight of him makes me feel in a measure as I did when I took his bitter
(244) medicines. Here is the substitution of a visual stimulus for one of taste; to an outsider, it would be inexplicable that I should so 'express' myself in reference to this man. As a fact, emotional attitudes actually found in man and animals show cases of connection between the stimulus and its discharge just as remote as this, and equally unintelligible, until we come to see that by the usurpation of old habits of movement, a new experience gets permanently substituted for an old one, in the economy of the organism's growth, and so the conditions of the original rise and form of utility of the attitude in question are hopelessly obscured.
The evident outcome of these facts of substitution is, therefore, an exaggerated difficulty in telling how a particular attitude or series of organic changes, found associated with an emotion, actually arose; for not only may one substitution have been made in the course of race history, but many may have been made. This is shown in the rise of the 'short-cuts' described in the earlier discussion of the theory of Recapitulation. [11] The development of one process or function may be so necessary, and its substitution for another, and its usurpation of the discharge processes of that other, so complete, that the other may quite disappear, or be so overlaid with newer superseding functions as to be a mere rudiment, an apparently useless appendage to the organism's life. But the fact that we can thus account for such cases, on the theory of serviceable habits, is itself a sufficient reason for doing so. For it thus brings the whole life of organic reaction under the one principle of development.
This has also a very interesting application to the facts of consciousness. I try to show in a later chapter that it is this principle of organic substitution that lies at the basis of memory, and gives us an adequate genetic theory of the function
(245) of representation as a whole. And further, and still more Surprising? it enables us to see that it is by the 'circular' or imitative form of reaction, that the higher motor functions have had their rise. For in cases where man, animal, or animalcule, acts in a way which does not seem to be imitative, -- does not seem to have as its objective point the maintenance or reproduction of a particular kind of stimulation, or 'copy,' -- in all these cases, the principle of substitution comes in to remove the difficulty. We find that in these cases the original discharge processes of a reaction which was distinctly imitative, which did arise as a special adaptation to a particular sort of stimulation, have been usurped by a substitute stimulus, image, sensation, etc., and so completely, that the original stimulation, image, sensation, etc., which really effected and accounted for these processes in accordance with the law of utility, has been utterly blotted out. The case is argued later in some detail under the caption 'principle of lapsed links,' [12] so it need only be said here that this idea of 'analogous feeling stimuli,' tacked on by Darwin, merely, to the end of the formula for associated habit, becomes, in the higher reaches of psychological development, an explaining agent of wide application.
One further point should be noted. We are asked how it is that there are certain kinds of activities which are not only expressive of mental states, but are actually seized upon and developed by man for just the purpose, and no other, of expressing himself to others, -- speech, gesture, song, music, fine art, etc. These certainly seem to make simple expression an end in itself, and their importance is so great that society could not exist without these means of intercommunication between man and man. What, it may be asked, was the original utility of such actions
(246) apart from the conveying of a meaning from one being to another ?
It is easy to see, however, that true as this is, -- and its importance is fundamental to social psychology,[13] -- it makes no exception to the law of utility. For, of course, the conjoint action, the gregarious life, the conveying of meanings from one individual to another, is an acquirement itself profoundly useful to the individual and to the race. So to say that certain movements originally accidental, or diffuse, or hedonic -- these last mainly, it seems -- did convey meanings to other onlookers, is only to say that these movements themselves are adjustments for utility, as truly as are the movements, for example, which secure food. And that these expressive actions are selected, and these expressing beings, is only a result of serviceable associated habit. The evolution of handwriting, as an engine of expression, from the rude drawing of objects, shows that the first tracings were fitted to perform just this use, and did so. They therefore survived, and were refined upon for this very utility.
In short, expression is itself an utility. 'Expression for expression's sake,' the formula which we so often hear, is misleading. What is really meant by it is conscious expression, known to be expression, and ratified for the sake of social and personal ends.
A further factor in the ontogenetic acquirement of emotional attitudes and expressive functions is at once so important and so obscure that I only mention it here; it has detailed treatment later on. I refer to the fact mentioned also by Darwin, and discussed by Romanes, Mantegazza, and others, that the young of animals, and especially young children, get most of these functions by direct conscious imitation of their elders. The child first really learns what cer-
(247)-tain emotions are, by imitating the indications of them which it sees in the faces of older persons. We will see later that this tendency to imitate is really the higher conscious form of the very way of getting all useful actions which we have seen in lower organisms, the 'circular process' way; and so instead of presenting a new class of facts, it only serves to carry the principle of 'circular reaction' into the higher reaches of conscious function. In conscious imitation we have an impulse in which the very method of accommodation has been embodied, has become a habit. After knowledge arises, and voluntary selection, the first thing necessary to the individual in order to direct his life is to find out about all possible experiences; so the child imitates everything, thus securing in its own feeling, by this its own act of laying hold on experiences, the way of judging of things -- and the material of its judgments -- as to their relative value for further cultivation, and their relative difficulty in pursuit. [14] That great theatre of experience, that splendid natural kindergarten, the spontaneous games of children and animals, plays of all kinds, is a practice ground in imitative semblances of what is afterwards life's serious business; and the young learn how such things feel by these imitations of them, and so get prepared for their actual onset in later life. [15]
Looking back now upon all the facts which the various 'principles,' so called, are used to explain, we find a very mixed condition of things covered by the usual phrase 'expression of the emotions.' There are utility elements whose
(248) rise by selection is plain; utterly refractory convulsive elements, whose lawlessness to all but mere discharge is evident; partially useful elements which had their origin in uses which they no longer serve; elements whose usefulness is clearly 'outlived and which are falling rapidly into decay, -- being rudimentary,' as the biologists are wont to say, -- and various groups of confusions evidently due to the grinding, erosion, rivalry, of developmental processes among themselves. And with all this, we find masses of associated organic movements -- in the bowels and vaso-motor system, with bizarre and uncouth sensations, such as flesh-creeping, shivering, backcrawling, fainting, etc. -- shifted and shunted from one connection to another, till they seem to have no reason nor measure in their place and function. But the unreason of it all is itself reasonable, as we now see; and we have no right to complain at results which we have reason for expecting from the carrying out of the general principles of evolution.
Endnotes
- Expression of the Emotions.
- Bell, The Anatomy of Expression; Mantegazza, Mosso, etc.
- See my criticism of such a dualism in the work of Marshall (Pleasure Pain, and Aesthetics), in The Psychological Review, I., November, 1894, pp 619 f.
- The Psychological Review, I., September, 1894, p. 525.
- It may be said, as it has been said to the writer, in conversation, by one who is well
informed in biology, that this view which requires the distinct recognition of movements
toward advantageous sources of stimulation and away from what is disadvantageous, is taken
by many biologists, and so there is no need of argument. With this I do not agree; and it
is well to point out the fact that Darwin in this crucial case of antithetical movements
did not use any such principle. And yet the need of some such real antithesis so strongly
impressed the mind of Darwin, as is seen in his detailed casting about in his Chapter II.
for some proof of antithesis, that his attitude seems to me to throw his authority
somewhat on that side in opposition to the current theories which consider the organism
practically passive in its uniform responses to stimulation. Passages, indeed, might be
quoted abundantly from Darwin, which show what his doctrine of organic adaptation probably
would have been if he had developed it. Of course biologists admit the fact that living
creatures of certain kinds behave as if they found some sensations pleasant and others
repulsive; it is the facts as reported by biologists that I am resting the case upon. But
they have never, I think, made this kind of antithetical reaction fundamental to the life
process, nor have they ever utilized it to explain general motor adaptations. It has been
treated instead as a sort of outside fact and, as it were, a mystery, a fact which the
chemical theorists did not like to recognize at all, and one which the vitalists cited in
support of 'vital force,' 'directive tendency,' and that kind of thing. Recently
psychologists have taken it up as lending evidence to certain theories of the 'psychic
properties of matter,' etc.
In short, this most remarkable of all adaptations in biology has had just about the same treatment in that science that the fact of conscious imitation has had by psychologists. Conscious imitation has been remarked upon ever since Aristotle, vaguely described, and then dropped, simply because psychological theory gave no opening for such a mysterious thing. I cite below the contradictory utterances of certain psychologists on imitation.
And when we come to compare the two facts, it is sufficiently plain that the theory of adaptation may be reconstructed in such a way as to show that this kind of functional selection by movement, and this kind of imitative selection by consciousness, are in type the same. 'Organic imitation' and 'conscious imitation' -- each a circular process tending to maintain certain stimulations and to avoid others -- here is one thing. Organic and mental adaptation is one process and one only, and it works by this contrast of movements from the start.
- See his detailed instances, loc. cit., pp. 66 ff.
- Except when extreme, when they may become useless and destructive.
- At the extremes, in both cases, there are convulsive discharges that are more mechanical than physiological.
- Loc. cit. p. 48.
- Below, Chap. X., § 3.
- Above, Chap. I., §§ 3, 4.
- Below, Chap. IX., § 3, and Chap. X., § 2.
- See the volume, Social and Ethical Interpretations, Chap. IV.
- This is developed below in Chap. XI., § 3 (which, however, cannot well be read without the earlier sections on Imitation); its social and educational 'Interpretation' is to be found in the volume referred to.
- This ' practice' role, here assigned to play (in the first edition of this book), is that now made the essential feature of Groos' important theory (see his Play of Animals and Play of Man).
