The groundwork of psychology / by G.F. Stout.

  • George Frederick Stout
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The groundwork of psychology / by G.F. Stout. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    degree. But such ingredients may also be absent or hardly discernible in his emotion of pity. All that is necessary is that his previous emotions of grief or impotent anger should have left behind them mental dispositions capable of modifying his emotional experience in the future and in particular rendering him susceptible of a certain kind of pity which he could not otherwise have felt. The word “ derivative,” then, does not necessarily imply complexity. It does not necessarily imply that the rela- tively primary types of emotion enter as ingredients into the composition of the emotion which presupposes them as its conditions. For the most part the primary emotions do recur, often very faintly and obscurely, in the derivative emotion. But it would lead to needless difficulties to sup- pose that this is always the case. Anger, fear, grief, joy, and surprise, in their rudimentary forms, seem to be absolutely primary. They do not pre- suppose other emotional experiences as their conditions or components. On the other hand, admiration, gratitude, remorse, and wounded vanity are examples of derivative emotions. There is evidently a wide field for psychological work in tracing the genetic connexion of derivative emotions with those which are relatively primary. Unfortunately, however, little of importance has been actually accom- plished in this direction. The earlier psychologists mainly content themselves with attempts to define, classify, and describe various types of emotion as if they were so many specimens in a museum. This line of treatment is utterly inadequate to do justice to the fluency of our emotional life, to the mode in which “ the internal shadings of emo- tional feeling merge endlessly into each other.”1 To 1 James’s “ Principles of Psychology,” Vol. II, p. 448.
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