Many men can never grow used to standing beside a cannon when it is fired off, although they perfectly know that there is danger neither for themselves nor for others -- the bare sound is too much for them."
Imagine two steel knife-blades with their keen edges crossing each other at right angles, and moving to and fro.Our whole nervous organization is 'on-edge ' at the thought; and yet what emotion can be there except the unpleasant nervous feeling itself, or the dread that more of it may come? The entire fund and capital of the emotion here is the senseless bodily effect which the blades immediately arouse.This case is typical of a class: where an ideal emotion seems to precede the bodily symptoms, it is often nothing but an anticipation of the symptoms themselves.One who has already fainted at the sight of blood may witness the preparations for a surgical operation with uncontrollable heart-sinking and anxiety.
He anticipates certain feelings, and the anticipation precipitates their arrival.In cases of morbid terror the subjects often confess that what possesses them seems, more than anything, to be fear of the fear itself.
In the various forms of what Professor Pain calls 'tender emotion,' although the appropriate object must usually be directly contemplated before the emotion can be aroused, yet sometimes thinking of the symptoms of the emotion itself may have the same effect.In sentimental natures the thought of 'yearning' will produce real 'yearning.' And, not to speak of coarser examples, a mother's imagination of the caresses she bestows on her child may arouse a spasm of parental longing.
In such cases as these we see plainly how the emotion both begins and ends with what we call its effects or manifestations.It has no mental status except as either the vivid feeling of the manifestations, or the idea of them; and the latter thus constitute its entire material, and sum and substance.And these cases ought to make us see how in all cases the feeling of the manifestations may play a much deeper part in the constitution of the emotion than we are wont to suppose.
The best proof that the immediate cause of emotion is a physical effect on the nerves is furnished by those pathological cases in which the emotion is objectless.One of the chief merits, in fact, of the view which I propose seems to be that we can so easily formulate by its means patho- logical cases and normal cases under a common scheme.
In every asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived fear, anger, melancholy, or conceit; and others of an equally unmotived apathy which persists in spite of the best of outward reasons why it should give way.In the former cases we must suppose the nervous machinery to be so 'labile' in some one emotional direction that almost every stimulus (however inappropriate)
causes it to upset in that way, and to engender the particular complex of feelings of which the psychic body of the emotion consists.Thus, to take one special instance, if inability to draw deep breath, fluttering of the heart, and that peculiar epigastric change felt as 'precordial anxiety,'
with an irresistible tendency to take a somewhat crouching attitude and to sit still, and with perhaps other visceral processes not now known, all spontaneously occur together in a certain person; his feeling of their combination is the emotion of dread, and he is the victim of what is known as morbid fear.A friend who has had occasional attacks of this most distressing of all maladies tells me that in his case the whole drama seems to centre about the region of the heart and respiratory apparatus, that his main effort during the attacks is to get control of his inspirations and to slow his heart, and that the moment he attains to breathing deeply and to holding himself erect, the dread, ipso facto , seems to depart.
The emotion here is nothing but the feeling of a bodily state, and it has a purely bodily cause.
"All physicians who have been much engaged in general practice have seen cases of dyspepsia in which constant low spirits and occasional attacks of terror rendered the patient's condition pitiable in the extreme.
I have observed these cases often, and have watched them closely, and I
have never seen greater suffering of any kind than I have witnessed during these attacks....Thus, a man is suffering from what we call nervous dyspepsia.Some day, we will suppose in the middle of the afternoon, without any warning or visible cause, one of these attacks of terror comes on.
The first thing the man feels is great but vague discomfort.Then he notices that his heart is beating much too violently.At the same time shocks or flashes as of electrical discharges, so violent as to be almost painful, pass one after another through his body and limbs.Then in a few minutes he falls into a condition of the most intense fear.He is not afraid of anything; he is simply afraid.His mind is perfectly clear.He looks for a cause his wretched condition, but sees none.Presently his terror is such that he trembles violently and utters low moans; his body is damp with perspiration; his mouth is perfectly dry; and at this stage there are no tears in his eyes, though his suffering is intense.When the climax of the attack is reached and passed, there is a copious flow of tears, or else a mental condition in which the person weeps upon the least provocation.
At this stage a large quantity of pale urine is passed.Then the heart's action becomes again normal, and the attack passes off."
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