A text-book of psychology.

  • Titchener, Edward Bradford, 1867-1927.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A text-book of psychology. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    in accordance with some principle that shall show their genesis and relationship. No attempt has been, and no attempt can be, more than partially successful. Emotions are processes of complex structure and of variable course; their analysis is yet in its first beginnings; the names by which we know them are, as a rule, class names, drawn from popular usage, and not terms of any scientific pre- cision. All that can be done at present, therefore, is to indicate one or two of the ways in which classification might be tried, without prospect of any final result. An emotion appears when a situation or predicament arises. If, then, we could ascertain the typical situations which an organism placed in the world of nature must face, the simplest and most inevitable situations of the physical world, we might perhaps determine the funda- mental emotions. It is'more probable, however, that we should end with some sort of biological schema of food emotions, chase emotions, sex emotions, and so forth, — a schema that would embody our own reflective interpre- tation of the situations, rather than a psychological classi- fication of the situations themselves. All emotions are coloured by the organic sensations set up during the adjustment of the physical organism to the situation. If, then, we could find typical groups of organic sensations — lung, heart, secretory sensations — appearing in the various emotions, we could, again, determine the fundamental forms. So far, however, we have neither physiological nor psychological data for working out a classification upon this basis.^ Emotions fall into two great groups according as the 1 E. Murray, Organic Sensation, in American Journal of Psychology, xx., 1909, 421.