BOOK I.
CH. II.
PART I.

$12. Sight.

of pleasure; the correspondence of the two curves in it is the source of the pleasure of admiration, and the ease of the curves themselves of the pleasure of enjoyment. These two sources of pleasure or of pain, and the pleasures and pains themselves, which are found together only in the two senses of hearing and sight, or, if in touch, yet in touch only as interpreted by sight, are carried over into representation with the objects in which they are found, and will be there discovered in greater perfection and complexity. Here it is proper only to consider them so far as they exist in single objects, that is, in objects or moments so small in space, or so brief in time, as to be fairly considered objects of presentative perception, not including memory or representation.

CHAPTER II.

PART II. THE EMOTIONS.

Our dark foundations.

Wordsworth.

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CH. II.

PART II.

§ 13. Emotion and

§ 13. 1. LET me first give what appears to be the current or psychological view of the emotions and their relation to representations. In redintegration, whether memory or imagination, and the representa- Representation. tions of which it consists, we appear to have before us phenomena which are purely subjective in character; we seem to be spectators in a theatre the scene of which consists of empty space and empty time, which the spectators themselves fill with scenery and actors of their own, drawn from their own experience. The curtain draws up, and instead of real scenery and real actors, the objects of presentation, there is a phantasmagoria of representations, the proper seat and home of which is in the brain of the spectator, and only projected by him upon the stage. This train of subjective images may, it is true, be more or less correspondent to the reality, to the objects of présentation by which it has been produced and of which it is a repetition, but it is in itself entirely

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CH. II.
PART II.
$13.
Emotion and

subjective, and its truth consists in the exactness with which it renders the objects and events of presentative perception. The distinction between object Representation. and subject falls here entirely beyond the train of representations, falls between that train and the objects of presentation which it represents. But, within this train of representations itself, the place formerly occupied by the distinction between object and subject is now occupied by another distinction, that between the representations themselves and the emotions which they excite, these emotions being new feelings aroused in us by the representations, deriving their character from them, and answering by minutely corresponding changes of emotion to every change in the representations which cause them. The emotions thus depend immediately upon the representations, mediately upon the objects of presentation which they reproduce; and that which the presented objects, or real things, are to the representations, these again in their turn are to the emotions, namely, comparatively real objects to feelings which are out and out subjective. Such I apprehend to be the current view.

2. Now it is true that emotions arise first in representation. Representation first completes the formation of remote objects of perception, the common objects which we see and hear and feel around us, which consist of presentative perceptions gathered up and combined into portions of space and of time in the way which it was attempted to describe in "Time and Space" § 26. Then first, on this having been done, a new set of feelings is disclosed, of feelings inhering in or attached to these objects, all which feelings are, by themselves, in the form of time only

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CH. II. PART II.

§ 13. Emotion and

and not of space, just as all the sensations are, except those of touch and sight. These new feelings pervade the entire remote objects when represented, and change with any the least changes in those repre- Representation. sentations. The represented qualities in the remote objects have each some share in the new feelings, the emotions, which attach to them.

Change any one of these qualities and the emotion is changed; or, if you start with observing a change in the emotion, you will find on examination that a change has taken place in the representation. But this change is, on the metaphysical view of the matter, not a case of causation of the one phenomenon by the other, but one of simultaneous change in the two phenomena in consequence of a change or a cause common to both. A change in emotion is not caused by a change in representation, but one change is the obverse aspect of the other; the pervading emotion and its representational framework are to each other as a ray of sunlight to its prismatic spectrum; they are the cognitive and the emotional aspects of one and the same state of consciousness.

3. It will be necessary to examine at some length the psychological theory of the emotions; but before doing so the true relation between the subjective and objective aspects of phenomena in presentation and representation must be made clear, since it is here that the misconception lies which gives rise to that theory, and here the central truth on which all metaphysical systems must be based. The act or moment of reflection, or self-consciousness, in which for the first time the distinction between the objective and subjective aspects is drawn, or discovered in phenomena, is the cardinal point in philosophy;

VOL. I.

H

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PART II.

§ 13.

Emotion and

and on the analysis of it depends the solution of all the most important questions in philosophy which are still agitated. An analysis of it was offered in Representation. "Time and Space" § 21, which I still think true; though I am very far from thinking that no more can be done to its elucidation. Nevertheless, since I am myself convinced, not only of its truth, but also that it offers the only means of reconciling Metaphysic with the special sciences, and of incorporating it into their system as a science among the rest, I will take leave to start from the point there reached, and proceed to show how the distinction between the objective and subjective aspects is applicable to all phenomena, whether presentative or representative, and in what sense these two aspects are inseparable from each other in fact, while they are always logically distinguishable.

4. Placing ourselves at the Subject's point of view (suppose an infant newly born), he feels a crowd of sensations occupying some duration in time and some extension in space; but these are to him mere phenomena, he has not reflected that he feels them, or that they are feelings coming from without him; in the next place, partly by redintegration, partly by new presentations combined with the old, these phenomena shape themselves into groups or things, his own body being one of these groups, and the rest coming and going around it; these groups of phenomena are what I have called remote objects of perception, "Time and Space" § 26. Then arises as one representation among the rest the distinction of Self from all its perceptions, and the consequent distinction of the subjective and objective aspects of what were previously mere phenomena, by a process