BOOK I. CH. II. PART III. $ 19. Emotions comparison. new to us, or if a presentation entirely new, and at the same time unlike what we have seen before, the two objects together are the framework of the emotion of Surprise. When this unlikeness continues, arising from so that both objects are familiar but unlike, there is Wonder. Astonishment is a great degree or intensity of surprise. When the new and unlike object is of such a kind in some of its features as to excite grief or aversion, there is Dread or Terror. When it is such as to excite joy or fondness, it is the object of Mirth, or joyful surprise, and to this belongs the phenomenon of laughing for joy. The comparison of new and old, familiar and unfamiliar, is the basis of the character of all these objects, and of the emotions which they are said to excite. When the two objects are familiar and old but incongruous in juxtaposition, being at the same time not such as to excite dread, there arises the simply laughable, the comic, or absurd. But of this incongruity there are two kinds; either the incongruity lies in the framework, the formal relations of the two objects which are brought forcibly together by some one or more points of relation in which they are congruous or by extraneous causes, or it lies in their emotional element, the one being an object of admiration, esteem, or fondness, the other of the reverse. In the former case, the contrast of thought or conception, there arises the sense of the witty; in the latter, the contrast of emotion, there arises the sense of the humorous. The interest of wit lies solely in the intellectual incongruity of the congruous, or congruity of the incongruous, that is, in a play of intellect. The interest of humour lies in the incongruity of the emotions, serious feelings with gay, important BOOK I. CH. II. PART III. $19. Emotions comparison. with trifling emotions, which are brought together under one intellectual conception or image. But wit and humour and their subdivisions must be rearising from served for treatment under the imaginative division of the direct emotions; for it is as actions, or when purposely invented or created, that their nature is best seen; when the desire for them prompts the imagination to pursue them. As passions or desires, wit and humour, the foundations of which have been now described, pass over into imaginative emotions. To return now to surprise or wonder, their common source. 2. Wonder is an emotion arising in contrast or dissimilarity of the familiar with the unfamiliar. This is an uneasy emotion; there arises then in it a desire to bring the two dissimilar objects into agreement; ease or the absence of effort in holding the two objects together in the mind is the motive, or thing desired, and is thus the foundation of the logical law of Parcimony, "frustra fit per plura quod fieri potest per pauciora," a law for Conation. The desire to assimilate the dissimilar, to equate the unequal, to measure the disproportioned, is the desire or passion which arises in the emotion of wonder; an intellectual desire, as the emotion is intellectual, an emotion of comparison. For it is not the particular feeling or emotion pervading each of the dissimilar objects which is ground or object of wonder or of its desire, but merely the fact of their dissimilarity or contrast. Anything or everything may be the object of wonder and of the desire for removing it; the desire and the emotion are general, universal, in reference to all objects whatever. The desire therefore is intellectual and general, a desire for knowledge. Hence the BOOK I. PART III. $ 19. Emotions comparison. truth of Aristotle's well known remark, that wonder is the parent of philosophy. There is in English no single good name for the desire of knowledge; for if we call it curiosity or inquisitiveness we are describing arising from it by its results, characterising it by what it appears to be in contrast to something else, not defining it. The whole of purely intellectual activity, of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, rests not upon the desire to know much or to know more than at present, for we easily acquiesce in a limit to our knowledge once ascertained to be irremovable, but upon the desire to remove an incongruity or dissimilarity in things which we already know or suspect to exist. Hence springs the a priori certainty of the axiom in Kant, In natura non datur saltus, non datur hiatus; to which he adds also-non datur casus, non datur fatum. That is to say, we cannot acquiesce in their continuance, but must endeavour to fill up the gap. The name I would propose instead of curiosity is logical instinct. 3. But although wonder is itself uneasy and requires removing by the completion of knowledge, the whole activity, of which it is the first step, is not painful but pleasurable; the want and its satisfaction together are an activity which is a natural need, and the absence of which is painful. This absence of the activity of wonder, logical instinct, and knowledge, is one branch of the feeling of Ennui; the other branch is the absence of emotional activity. In the first branch there is a craving for activity on the part of the intellect, which requires its natural food and stimulus. If wonder is the parent of philosophy, ennui is the parent of wonder, in the sense of being the appetite or hunger for intellectual activity, as it is Воок І. CH. II. PART III. $19. Emotions comparison. also for emotional. (See the remarks in Auguste Comte's Pol. Pos. Vol. i. Ch. iii. p. 686.) 4. Before leaving this group of emotions I must arising from mention one peculiar feeling, which seems to belong to it, and to be a particular mode of dread or terror, but for which I confess I am at a loss to assign a representational framework. Perhaps the very circumstance that there is no framework at hand in the feeling may be partly itself a constituent of its character. I mean to speak of that peculiar kind of awe or dread which makes the night-fears of children, and at times of older people also; which seems to be the same with the feeling, often sudden and marked in the moment of its arising, inspired by lonely mountain tops, or monuments of human agency in long deserted places, or by caverns or woods when we visit them alone. There is perhaps no better name for this feeling than Eeriness. It would seem that animals are not exempt from it; that children suffer most from it; and that the unoccupied mind is most liable to it. If it should be thought, as is not unlikely, that it is a feeling or consciousness of the presence of one's self without this consciousness being represented in a distinct shape, it would then be the emotion attending the first dawning of reflection or self-consciousness. It must be held too that men in the earliest stages of civilisation are the most subject to it, and feel it the most frequently and the most strongly, and on the incitement of the greatest number of objects; that it is in fact the main ingredient in what is to them religion, but which we are apt to call superstition. And this view seems to be confirmed by the circumstance that religious feeling is the special antidote to the pain of eeriness, as many an understanding mother no doubt instructs her children; an antidote which combats the shadowy terror with weapons more subtil and penetrating than its own, namely, with the sense of repose beneath the protection of Almighty God, from whom no secrets are hid. § 20. 1. In all the emotions hitherto examined there has been involved only the representation of objects as they have been actually presented; for in speaking of music and painting we have considered them from the spectator's not the composer's point of view; memory alone has been employed. But when new combinations of objects are introduced by redintegration, that is, old objects broken up and their fragments recombined in other shapes, this is to introduce new objects; and this kind of redintegration, whether it is spontaneous or voluntary, is imagination. First, objects of aversion or grief represented as future, or as likely to become presentations again, are objects of Fear. The representation of them as future is imaginative, since the remembered object is thereby represented in a new combination; an evil is imagined, the same with the old in point of content, but different from it in the circumstances which introduce and follow it. The simple consideration of happening in the future makes the representation imaginative. This is the simplest case; but the content of the future evil may also be represented as slightly different from before; this is an additional imaginative change. In the same way objects of joy or of fondness, represented as future, are imagined, and then become objects of Hope. It is plain that all the differences which attach to the objects and emotions of grief, joy, aversion, and fond VOL. I. M BOOK I. CH. II. PART III. § 20. Imaginative emotions arising from the matter. |