accompanying some of our motor responses, and not others. Perceptions are
crowding in upon us hour after hour; memory, thought, and imagination are in
constant play; and a continuous motor discharge results each moment in physical
expressions great or small. Yet, in spite of these facts, feeling which is strong
enough to rise to an emotion is only an occasional thing. If emotion accompanies
any form of physical expression, why not all? Let us see whether we can
discover any reason. One day I saw a boy leading a dog along the street. All at
once the dog slipped the string over its head and ran away. The boy stood
looking after the dog for a moment, and then burst into a fit of rage. What all had
happened? The moment before the dog broke away everything was running
smoothly in the experience of the boy. There was no obstruction to his thought
or his plans. Then in an instant the situation changes. The smooth flow of
experience is checked and baffled. The discharge of nerve currents which meant
thought, plans, action, is blocked. A crisis has arisen which requires
readjustment. The nerve currents must flow in new directions, giving new
thought, new plans, new activities—the dog must be recaptured. It is in
connection with this damming up of nerve currents from following their wonted
channels that the emotion emerges. Or, putting it into mental terms, the emotion
occurs when the ordinary current of our thought is violently disturbed—when we
meet with some crisis which necessitates a readjustment of our thought relations
and plans, either temporarily or permanently.
The Duration of an Emotion.—If the required readjustment is but temporary,
then the emotion is short-lived, while if the readjustment is necessarily of longer
duration, the emotion also will live longer. The fear which follows the thunder is
relatively brief; for the shock is gone in a moment, and our thought is but
temporarily disturbed. If the impending danger is one that persists, however, as
of some secret assassin threatening our life, the fear also will persist. The grief of
a child over the loss of someone dear to him is comparatively short, because the
current of the child's life has not been so closely bound up in a complexity of
experiences with the lost object as in the case of an older person, and hence the
readjustment is easier. The grief of an adult over the loss of a very dear friend
lasts long, for the object grieved over has so become a part of the bereaved one's
experience that the loss requires a very complete readjustment of the whole life.
In either case, however, as this readjustment is accomplished the emotion
gradually fades away.
Emotions Accompanying Crises in Experience.—If our description of the
feelings has been correct, it will be seen that the simpler and milder feelings are