EMOTION. This is the name for one of the comprehensive departments of the human mind. It is now usual to make a threefold division of the mind—E., or feeling; volition, or action prompted by feeling's; and intellect, or thought. It is not meant that these can be manifested in absolute separation; or that we can be at one time all E., another time all volition, and again all thought, without either of the other two. But although our living mind is usually a coneurrence,•in greater or less degree, of all of them, still they can be distinguished as presenting very different appearances, according as one or other predominates. Wonder, anger, fear, affection, are emotions; the acts that we perform to procure pleasurable feelings, and avoid painful, are volitions, or exercises of will; memory and reasoning are processes of thought, or intellect.
E. is essentially a condition of the waking, conscious mind. When asleep, or in a faint, or in any of those states called "being unconscious," we have no E.; to say that we have would be a contradiction, which shows that "emotion" is a very wide and comprehensive word. In fact, whenever we are mentally excited "anyhow," we may be said to be under emotion. Our active movements and intellectual pro cesses can sometimes go on with very little consciousness; we may walk and scarcely be aware of it; trains of thought may be proved to have passed through the mind while we are unconscious of them. Now, it is these unconscious modes of volition and intellect that present the greatest contrast to E.; showing how nearly co-exten sive this word is with mental wakefulness, or consciousness, in its widest signifi cation.
E., then, is of the very essence of mind, although not expressing the whole of mind. There are three distinct kinds or divisions of it: pleasures, pains, and excitement that is neither pleasurable nor painful.
Every kind of pleasure is included under E. in its widest acceptation. The pleas ures of the senses are as much of an emotional character as those pleasures that are not of the senses—as, for example, those of power, pride, affection, malevolence, knowl edge, fine art, etc. Every one of our senses may be made to yield pleasurable E.; and all those other susceptibilities, sometimes called the special emotions, of which a classi fication is given below, are connected with our pleasures or our pains. What pleasure
is in its inmost nature, each one must find from his own experience; it is an ultimate fact of the human consciousness which cannot be resolved into anything more funda mental, although, as will be seen, we can lay down the laws that connect it with the other manifestations of mind—namely, action and thought, and with the facts of our corporeal life, In the next place, pain is a species of emotion. We know this condition as being the opposite of pleasure, as the source of activity directed to its removal or abatement, and as the cause of a peculiar outward appearance, known as the expression or physi ognomy of pain. All the inlets of pleasure are also inlets of pain. The various sensi bilities of the mind, whether the outward senses, or the more inward emotions, give rise at one time to pleasure, at other times to pain, the conditions of each being generally well understood by us; we can define the agencies that cause pleasure or suffering through the skin, the ear, or the eye.
But it is requisite, further, to recognize certain modes of neutral excitement, in order to exhaust the compass of emotion. We are very often roused, shocked, excited, or made mentally alive, when we can hardly say that we are either pleased or put to pain. The mind is awakened and engrossed with some one thing, other things are excluded; and the particular cause of the excitement is impressed upon us so as to be afterwards remembered, while all the time we are removed alike from enjoyment and from suffer ing. This is a kind of E. that has its principal value in the sphere of intellect. The E. of wonder or astonishment is not seldom of this nature; for although we sometimes derive pleasure, and sometimes the opposite, from a shock of surprise, we are very fre quently affected in neither way, being simply impressed. The strange appearance of a comet gives far more of this neutral effect than of the others. It is a thing that pos sesses our mind at the time, and is afterwards vividly remembered by us, and these are the chief consequences of its having roused our wonder.