the case is no different. Who has not reveled in the pleasure accompanying the
memories of past joys? On the other hand, who is free from all unpleasant
memories—from regrets, from pangs of remorse? Who has not dreamed away an
hour in pleasant anticipation of some desired object, or spent a miserable hour in
dreading some calamity which imagination pictured to him? Feeling also
accompanies our thought processes. Everyone has experienced the feeling of the
pleasure of intellectual victory over some difficult problem which had baffled
the reason, or over some doubtful case in which our judgment proved correct.
And likewise none has escaped the feeling of unpleasantness which accompanies
intellectual defeat. Whatever the contents of our mental stream, "we find in
them, everywhere present, a certain color of passing estimate, an immediate
sense that they are worth something to us at any given moment, or that they then
have an interest to us."
The Seeming Neutral Feeling Zone.—It is probable that there is so little
feeling connected with many of the humdrum and habitual experiences of our
everyday lives, that we are but slightly, if at all, aware of a feeling state in
connection with them. Yet a state of consciousness with absolutely no feeling
side to it is as unthinkable as the obverse side of a coin without the reverse.
Some sort of feeling tone or mood is always present. The width of the affective
neutral zone—that is, of a feeling state so little marked as not to be discriminated
as either pleasure or pain, desire or aversion—varies with different persons, and
with the same person at different times. It is conditioned largely by the amount
of attention given in the direction of feeling, and also on the fineness of the
power of feeling discrimination. It is safe to say that the zero range is usually so
small as to be negligible.
2. MOOD AND DISPOSITION
The sum total of all the feeling accompanying the various sensory and thought
processes at any given time results in what we may call our feeling tone, or
mood.
How Mood is Produced.—During most of our waking hours, and, indeed,
during our sleeping hours as well, a multitude of sensory currents are pouring
into the cortical centers. At the present moment we can hear the rumble of a
wagon, the chirp of a cricket, the chatter of distant voices, and a hundred other
sounds besides. At the same time the eye is appealed to by an infinite variety of
stimuli in light, color, and objects; the skin responds to many contacts and