Emotionalism

“ What, then, is the nature of this emotional appeal which surpasses so much in intimacy, pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect? It is the keystone of the inward nature, that which binds all together in the arch of life. Emotion has some ground, some incitement which calls it forth; and it responds with most energy to beauty. ”

“ What other than a very real thing has it been in the life of the world—sprung out of, and again causing to spring forth, such volumes of human emotion—making a current, as it were, of feeling, that has drawn within its own sphere all the moral vitality of so many ages! ”

“ The second order introduces the sympathetic emotions. They are evoked on sight of the sufferings or emotional states of others. If we see a woman insulted, we are filled with indignation; and this emotion has a sympathetic origin. The third order comprises the complex feelings known as sentiments. They have reference to certain qualities of objects or activities of individuals which inspire admiration or disapprobation. They are abstract in their nature, and belong to the conceptual sphere. Such are love of truth, beauty, virtue, liberty, justice. ”

“ An important characteristic of feelings consists lastly in the fact that they combine themselves into an affective process, which as a rule is joined to an ideational process. A temporal process of this kind with an affective and ideational content, that changes but is nevertheless joined together, we call an emotion, or with less intensity and a more lasting nature of the feelings, a disposition. Joy, delight, merriness, hope are emotions in which the predominant feeling is pleasure; anger, grief, sorrow, and fear are emotions in which displeasure predominates. ”

“ Consequently it is precisely the same thing for our emotional life, whether it is the objective world or merely the show of the same, in virtue of which a situation, a relation, or any content of life, in short, is brought home to us. Either mode is equally able to stir in us an echo to the essential secret which it carries, whether it be in grief or joy, in agitation or convulsion, and can cause to flow through us the feelings and passions of anger, hate, pity, anxiety, fear, love, reverence and admiration, honour and fame. ”

“ Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience. All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions. ”

“ We go out from the sway of this imagined world, more sensitive to life, more accessible to emotion, more likely and more capable, when the occasion arises, to feel rightly, and to carry that feeling out into an act. In all literature the knowledge gained objectively, whether of action or emotion, is a preparation for life; but this intimate experience of emotion in connection with an imagined world is a more vital preparation, and enters more directly, easily, and effectually into men's bosoms. ”

“ The superior and truly human forms of emotion are reducible to four principal groups: the religious, moral, æsthetic, and intellectual sentiments. Although the somatic characters accompanying each of these will be noted with the greatest care in the second part of this work, it will be necessary, even at present, to enumerate the principal in advance. We must more especially be on our guard against the common error which insists in seeking emotion 99where nothing remains of it save a mere survival and shadow. ”

“ Do we affect them by a sympathy unknown to them as they move us by a revelation more intimate than could be uttered by words? We discover in ourselves a new sense. By touch with the soul we understand. ”

“ When we look closely and deeply at the world about us,—whether at this ordered world of nature, moving steadily in its unbroken and majestic course, or at the external aspect of grandeur and loveliness, or at the drama in which all men are actors, as it is disclosed to insight and sympathy, or at the inner world of each one's personal experience,—do we not find ourselves in the perpetual presence of Goodness, Order, Beauty, Love? ”

“ These feelings antecedent to passion, and which seem to be the causes of passion, shall be distinguished by the name of emotions.
What is now said about the production of passion, resolves into a very simple proposition, That we love what is pleasant, and hate what is painful. And indeed it is evident, that without antecedent emotions we could not have any passions; for a thing must be pleasant or painful, before it can be the object either of love or of hatred. ”

“ When, in a still further movement of analysis, we examine the nature of this struggle between the soul and the mystery which surrounds the soul, we find it complicated by the fact that the soul's encounter with this mystery reveals the existence, in the depths of the soul itself, of two conflicting emotions, the emotion of love and the emotion of malice. ”

“ If we look into our emotional life, we find, besides the true emotions, with which we have become familiar in Chapter III, a great number of feelings or feeling-tones which color either pleasurably or painfully our emotions and our ideas. On the one hand there are pleasure, joy, exaltation, courage, cheer, confidence, satisfaction; and on the other, pain, sorrow, depression, apprehension, gloom, distrust, and dissatisfaction. Every complex which is laid away in our subconscious is tinted, either slightly or intensely, with its specific feeling-tone. ”

“ The intellectual faculties are wakeful, questioning, mistrustful; the emotions are blind, hopeful, confiding; the one reasoning, exacting, demonstrating; the other, believing, inspiring, devout. The intellect sees, the emotions feel; and, though these functions may blend, the one can never supersede the other.
The quality of the emotional faculties is represented by Benevolence, Sympathy, Joy, Hope, Confidence, Gratitude, Love, and Devotion, all of which are the very antitheses of the attributes of animal feeling, described as Melancholy, Fear, Anger, Hate, Malevolence, and Despair. ”

“ It seems impossible to discuss any psychological principle without finally coming back to the subject of emotions. It truly seems that all roads lead to the instincts and to the emotions which drive them. And so, as we follow the trail of suggestion, we suddenly turn a corner and find ourselves back at our starting-point—the emotional life. Like all other ideas, suggestions get tied up with emotions to form complexes, of which the driving-power is the emotion. ”

“ We shall then illustrate afresh our problem if we consider how this difficulty of the choice of an ideal has affected the search of certain among our modern romantic poets for what they would call the ideal emotion.
II.
Of all the subjects of reflection in romantic poetry, none is more familiar than the question of the meaning and worth of human life as a whole. The first and natural answer of the modern poet to this question is well known. Human life means for him the emotional side of life. The highest good, when found, must be an emotional good. ”

“ But, in spite of rational theories, the world's heart still thrills to a generous emotion so overpowering as to drown all consideration of self, whether or not it is faulty in its mundane wisdom or its arithmetic. ”

“ So in these depths of the soul's life the arrangements and re-arrangements of units go on, while on the surface the results appear from moment to moment in sensations keen or dull, in perceptions clear or vague, in judgments wise or foolish, in memories gay or sad, in sordid or lofty trains of thought, in gusts of anger or thrills of love. ”

“ It is not real emotion. You have the vivid ideas, so vivid that a fringe of emotional association accompanies them, as you might shudder remembering a bad dream. But the real emotion arises only from the real impulse, the real responsibility. ”

“ The distinction between wise use and misuse lies in whether disintegrating or creative thoughts, with their correspondingly energizing or depressing [Pg 41] emotions or feelings, are allowed to hold sway in consciousness.
Energizing Emotions
When we speak of energizing emotions or feelings we mean love, courage, brightness, earnestness, cheer, enthusiasm. When we speak of depressing emotions or feelings we mean doubt, fear, worry, gloom.
No elements are more essential to a successful business or a successful life than the right kind of emotional elements. ”

“ And Affections.--And it is not only the same desires; all people, everywhere, have the same affections and passions which act in the same way under similar provocation: joy and grief, love and resentment, benevolence, sympathy, fear, and much else, are common to all of us. ”

“ Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on the harness, and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behaviour of the other. ”

“ Must the benevolent emotions, which I have hitherto delighted to cherish, turn into misanthropy—must the fervent and social affections of my heart give place to inanity, to apathy—must the activity of a curious and vigorous mind sink into torpor and abhorred vacuity? ”

“ We find one who cannot think of the Walkürenritt without feeling himself lifted as if by motor impulses.
4. Emotions.—The phenomena of this group, though more complex, are, in fact, only a prolongation of our third group. But, in order to obtain a correct notion of their revivability, we must not proceed by way of generalities. To ask any given individual whether he is capable of reviving past emotions would be a useless question. I have always asked persons to try and recall a particular case of a particular emotion (fear, anger, love, etc.) ”

“ The Emotions or Feelings.—The emotions are joy, love, grief, hatred, anger, jealousy, and other like conditions, and we speak of them as “natural,” because they appear without the operation of our intellect or will, and the capacity for them seems to be a part of our existence. ”

“ You blush for the lack of that glow of feeling which once fastened to every home-object.
[Does a man indeed outgrow affections as his mind ripens? Do the early and tender sympathies become a part of his intellectual perceptions, to be appreciated and reasoned upon as one reasons about truths of science? Is their vitality necessarily young? Is there the same ripe, joyous burst of the heart at the recollection of later friendships, which belonged to those of boyhood; and are not the later ones more the suggestions of judgment, and less the absolute conditions of the heart's health?] ”

“ The same philosopher in counselling self-restraint adds:
"The mind's power over the emotions consists, first, in the actual knowledge of the emotions." Again: "An emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it." ”

“ For since emotion is eternally divided against itself into love and malice, the three primordial ideas which deal this emotion are also eternally divided against themselves, into beauty and hideousness, into goodness and evil, into reality and unreality. ”

“ And for this reason every time we experience afresh the particular emotion associated with the quality beautiful, we are adding to that rhythm of life within ourselves by recognising the life of all things. There is not room within us for two conflicting waves of emotion, for two conflicting rhythms of life, one sane and one unsound. ”

“ And since we are their only real actors, these empathic dramas of lines are bound to affect us, either as corroborating or as thwarting our vital needs and habits; either as making our felt life easier or more difficult, that is to say as bringing us peace and joy, or depression and exasperation. ”

“ These passions that may be suddenly excited, and are of short duration, as anger, fear, and oftentimes jealousy, may in this manner be fully represented; but those great masters of the soul, ambition, hatred, love, every passion that is permanent in its nature, and varied in progress, if represented to us but in one stage of its course, is represented imperfectly. ”

“ The emotion owes its strength to its suddenness and intensity; but it soon exhausts itself, and the sentiment with which it clashed remains dominant. It is a sign of moral progress when the sentiment completely controls and organises the emotions and desires of life in accordance with its own end. ”

“ The emotional type attracts the reader through its appeal to elemental instincts and feelings in men, as desire for food and life, vain grief for one lost, struggle for position in society, undeserved prosperity or misfortune, abnormal fear of death, stoicism in the face of danger, etc. ”

“ If, e.g., we take the most intellectualised forms of the religious or the æsthetic sentiment, we shall have much trouble in recovering the physiological conditions of its existence. There is nothing surprising in this, all we have in this case being an abstract or extract of emotion, a simple mark, an emotional scheme, an affective substitute equivalent to those intellectual substitutes which take the place of the concrete. What we must study is true emotion, felt and expressed, not inadequately recalled to memory, a pale remnant of what once was an emotion. ”