but it is with the latter condition that I almost exclusively associate the cutaneous tingling and hair-stirring.But to call my enjoyment of the form , of the note-after-note ness of a melody a mere critical 'judgment of right' would really be to deny to me the power of expressing a fact of simple and intimate expression in English.
It is quintessentially emotion....Now there are hundreds of other bits of music....which I judge to be right without receiving an iota of the emotion.For purposes of emotion they are to me like geometrical demonstrations or like acts of integrity performed in Peru." The Beethoven-rightness of which Gurney then goes on to speak, as something different from the Clementi-rightness (even when the respective pieces are only heard in idea), is probably a purely auditory-sensational thing.The Clementi-rightness also; only, for reasons impossible to assign, the Clementi form does not give the same sort of purely auditory satisfaction as the Beethoven form, and might better be described perhaps negatively as non-wrong , i.e., free from positively unpleasant acoustic quality.In organizations as musical as Mr.Gurney's, purely acoustic form gives so intense a degree of sensible pleasure that the lower bodily reverberation is of no account.But I repeat that I see nothing in the facts which Mr.Gurney cites, to lead one to believe in an emotion divorced from sensational processes of any kind.
In his chapter on 'Ideal Emotion,' to which the reader is referred for farther details on this subject.
Those feelings which Prof.Bain calls 'emotions of relativity,' excitement of novelty, wonder, rapture of freedom, sense of power, hardly survive any repetition of the experience.But as the text goes on to explain, and as Goethe as quoted by Prof.Höffding says, this is because "the soul is inwardly grown larger without knowing it, and can no longer be filled by that first sensation.The man thinks that he has lost, but really he has gained.What he has lost in rapture, he has gained in inward growth." "It is," as Prof.Höffding himself adds, in a beautiful figure of speech, " with our virgin feelings, as with the first breath drawn by the new-born child, in which the lung expands itself so that it can never be emptied to the same degree again.No later breath can feel just like that first one." On this whole subject of emotional blunting., compare Höffding's Psychologie, VI.E., and Bain's Emotions and Will.chapter IV.of the first part.
M.Fr.Paulhan, in a little work full of accurate observations of detail (Les Phénomènes Affectifs et les Lois de leur Apparition), seems to me rather to turn the truth upside down by his formula that emotions are due to an inhibition of impulsive tendencies.One kind of emotion, namely, uneasiness, annoyance, distress, does occur when any definite impulsive tendency is checked, and all of M.P.'s illustrations are drawn from this sort.The other emotions are themselves primary impulsive tendencies, of a diffusive sort (involving, as M.P.
rightly says, a multiplicité des phénomènes); and just in proportion as more and more of these multiple tendencies are checked, and replaced by some few narrow forms of discharge, does the original emotion tend to disappear.
A list of the older writings on the subject is given in Mantegazza's work, La Physionomie et 1'Expression, chap, I; others in Darwin's first chapter.Bell's Anatomy of Expression, Mosso's La Paura, Piderit's Wissenschaftliches System der Mimik und Physiognomik, Duchenne's Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine, are, besides Lange and Darwin, the most useful works with which I am acquainted.Compare also Sully: Sensation and Intuition, chap.II.
One must remember, however, that just in so far forth as sexual selection may have played a part in determining the human organism, selection of expressive faces must have increased the average mobility of the human countenance.
Psychol., §213.
Weeping in childhood is almost as regular a symptom of anger as it is of grief, which would account (on Darwin's principles)
for the frown of anger.Mr.Spencer has an account of the angry frown as having arisen through the survival of the fittest, by its utility in keeping the sun out of one's eyes when engaged in mortal combat (!).(Principle of Psychology, II.546.) Professor Mosso objects to any explanation of the frown by its utility for vision, that it is coupled, during emotional excitement, with a dilatation of the pupil which is very unfavorable for distinct vision, end that this ought to have been weeded out by natural selection, if natural selection had the power to fix the frown (see La Paura, chap.IX.§VI).Unfortunately this very able author speaks as if all the emotions affected the pupil in the same way.Fear certainly does make it dilate.But Gratiolet is quoted by Darwin and others as saying that the pupils contract in anger.I have made no observations of my own on the point, and Mosso's earlier paper on the pupil (Turin, 1875)I
have not seen.I must repeat, with Darwin, that we need more minute observations on this subject.
Physiologie u.Psychologie des Lachens und des Komischen (Berlin, 1873), pp.13 15
These movements are explained teleologically, in the first instance, by the efforts which the tongue is forced to make to adapt itself to the better perception or avoidance of the sapid body.
(Cf.Physiol.Psych., II.423.)
Professor Henle derives the negative wag of the head from an incipient shudder, and remarks how fortunate is the abbreviation, as when a lady declines a partner in the ballroom.The clapping of the hands for applause he explains as a symbolic abridgment of an embrace.
