Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

In studying any state of consciousness we first inquire what constitutes its dominant factor; if this is sense of object, we call it a cognition; if effortful action, it is a vo...

The lowest organisms come in contact with things, have objective relations of contact, but it is quite unlikely that the earliest psychic life feels contacts, really touches thi...

Popular and scientific observation agree that a very interesting and important phenomenon in consciousness is the sense of self as involving such feelings as pride, shame, self-...

The primary function of mentality, as we have throughout assumed, is as stimulant to activities advantageous to the individual under the conditions of its existence; hence all t...

The term attention is, like feeling, a word of extremely doubtful and variable import. Like feeling, attention may be used as denominating any stage of consciousness, or it may...

Mr. Herbert Spencer’s famous essay, entitled, “The Philosophy of Style”—by which is meant the Psychology of Style—propounds what we may term the economic theory of literary effe...

Science views the world as an assemblage of objects having mutual relations. In this cosmos of interacting elements certain objects become endowed with mental powers by which th...

In the present haste to construct psychology as a natural science cognate to chemistry, physics, and biology, we note much that is premature and confusing, owing to insufficient...

A blind psychic life of pure feeling cannot long avail in the sharp struggle of existence, for to all stimulations it secures only two crude reactions, a spasmodic, defensive ac...

Brown divided emotions into retrospective and prospective, but such a classification has no basis in a general biological view nor yet in a special analysis of the particular ph...

The problem of the origin and nature of æsthetic feeling is a definite psychological problem to be solved only by introspection careful and prolonged. We must take simple cases...

It may be considered as plausible that if the first feeling was pain, the first emotion was also of the pain character. The first representation of an object as painful induced...

“I feel cold,” and “I feel afraid of cold,” are expressions which denote two tolerably distinct feelings. The main characteristic which distinguishes the second feeling as an em...

The need of a closer psychological definition and interpretation of ethical emotion must be apparent to any reader of the current psychology, where we find the utmost confusion...

The bearing of our studies on a theory of the conditions of pleasure-pain is obvious. If we consider pure feeling as the primary, fundamental, and conditioning mentality, it sta...

Fear, according to the analysis we have made, includes representation of object in its feeling value, predominant tone of mental pain, and will recoil. Fear in its primitive for...

We have implied throughout that we have feeling about a thing only so far as we attach on basis of past experience an experience value to the thing, as we say, “the burnt child...

To anticipate what is to occur is plainly one of the most useful achievements of mind, for all providence implies apprehension and emotion therewith. But to look before and afte...

Should the term Feeling be made to include certain states of consciousness which are neither pleasurable nor painful? Or should all such neutral states be designated by some oth...

Of all the sciences psychology is, perhaps, the most imperfect. If a science is a body of knowledge obtained by special research and accepted by the general _consensus_ of speci...

Despair is a phase of painful emotion which is certainly related to fear, yet is very distant from it. Despair has always a fear basis; we can only despair where fear is implied...