Emotion

Emotion, a word used in philosophy with some considerable variety of meaning. The phenomena of the mind may be divided into three groups—cognitions, emotions, and volitions, into intellect or thought, feeling, and will. The emotions taken in this sense constitute one of the great groups of mental activities. They may be pleasurable, painful, or neutral, and may be arranged according as they arise directly out of the senses, movements, and appetites or not. In the latter case they comprise feelings of freedom and restraint, wonder, terror, love, self-complacency, the sense of power, anger, love of knowledge, artistic emotions, the moral sense, &c. As they combine and pass into one another by infinite gradations, a systematic and exhaustive classification is impossible. Sometimes emotion implies that the feeling is keenly experienced, so as to occasion mental disturbance. The expression of the emotions, especially in the face, was carefully studied by Sir Charles Bell; and Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1873) is a monument of patient observation and insight. The emotions act powerfully on the organic functions of the body, as illustrated in blushing, quicker or slower pulsation of the heart, cold perspiration, &c. The term feeling is used with even greater laxity than emotion. It is sometimes the perception we have of extreme objects, of their being hard or soft, hot or cold, in which case it is the intellectual function of sensation, or the sensation itself. Again, it may be specifically pleasure, pain, or the neutral emotion, or emotion in the widest sense. Or it may be used loosely for almost any kind of consciousness, as by James Mill. The higher feelings, as the appreciation of the sublime and beautiful, approval and disapproval, are often termed sentiments. See the article PSYCHOLOGY, and the list of works there cited.