The evolution of feeling / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
[1923?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The evolution of feeling / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/14 (page 8)
    common both to anger and to the sexual emotion; fighting is common to fear (fighting at bay) and anger; crying is com¬ mon to extreme joy and sorrow. The emotion, like the senti¬ ment, also comes to contain not only an opposition of elements but a succession of elements. Each instinct has its own instinctive feeling, based on its affect of gladness, interest, repugnance, etc. So far as they occur in separation from the emotion systems, the individual instincts contain within them the rudiments of intelligent activity. They are, to a certain extent, variable, plastic and modifiable by experience. They, in turn, are composed of differently integrated antagonistic and successive responses, those of the higher and lower reflex systems. On the first occasion of its experience each instinct develops its own peculiar innate instinct feeling, determined by the tendency to act so long as to secure a certain end. Like the emotion feeling, the instinct feeling depends for its full development on the experience resulting from the act. But, when by a single experience an instinct feeling or an emotion feeling or a sentiment feeling has incorporated the feelings arising from its expression in activity, it does not need on a second occasion to await the slow process of expression before it can be experienced in its now more fully developed form. * And so finally we reach once more the reactions of the most primitive organism itself, where the affect, corresponding to our gladness, sadness, bliss, distress, interest, repugnance, contentment, apathy, arises not through the special kind of organic or bodily response, but is the psychical equivalent of the innate general purpose, the control of the organic and bodily activity in relation to the environment, and receives additional feeling as a consequence of that activity. This con¬ dition is exemplified in our higher reflexes (e.g., vomiting, sneezing, etc.) which are partly under self-control. The stimulus evokes a condition of organic discord (or harmony), which, owing to the integration within the system of the reflex, of certain controllable actions, and in virtue of their results, develops an affect of distress (or gladness), etc. The lower reflexes (e.g., erection of hairs) which are wholly beyond control and never occur through any conscious impulse, only affect the self by the organic sensations they evoke through the reaction. These produce a state of organic harmony or discord—the most primitive and the most fundamental equivalent of affect we are able to trace. * Hence an emotion once experienced, can conceivably be re-experienced by an animal almost wholly deprived of organic and bodily sensibility (CJ. Sherrington, Proc. P.S., 1910, lxvi. 390-403).