CHAPTER XIV
FEELING AND ITS FUNCTIONS
In the psychical world as well as the physical we must meet and overcome
inertia. Our lives must be compelled by motive forces strong enough to
overcome this natural inertia, and enable us besides to make headway against
many obstacles. The motive power that drives us consists chiefly of our feelings
and emotions. Knowledge, cognition, supplies the rudder that guides our ship,
but feeling and emotion supply the power.
To convince one's head is, therefore, not enough; his feelings must be stirred if
you would be sure of moving him to action. Often have we known that a certain
line of action was right, but failed to follow it because feeling led in a different
direction. When decision has been hanging in the balance we have piled on one
side obligation, duty, sense of right, and a dozen other reasons for action, only to
have them all outweighed by the one single: It is disagreeable. Judgment,
reason, and experience may unite to tell us that a contemplated course is unwise,
and imagination may reveal to us its disastrous consequences, and yet its
pleasures so appeal to us that we yield. Our feelings often prove a stronger
motive than knowledge and will combined; they are a factor constantly to be
reckoned with among our motives.
1. THE NATURE OF FEELING
It will be our purpose in the next few chapters to study the affective content of
consciousness—the feelings and emotions. The present chapter will be devoted
to the feelings and the one that follows to the emotions.
The Different Feeling Qualities.—At least six (some writers say even more)
distinct and qualitatively different feeling states are easily distinguished. These
are: pleasure, pain; desire, repugnance; interest, apathy. Pleasure and pain, and
desire and repugnance, are directly opposite or antagonistic feelings. Interest and
apathy are not opposites in a similar way, since apathy is but the absence of
interest, and not its antagonist. In place of the terms pleasure and pain, the