The groundwork of psychology / by G.F. Stout.

  • Stout, George Frederick, 1860-1944.
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The groundwork of psychology / by G.F. Stout. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    situations in which they are so charged with meaning that they seem to concentrate love in a moment. At meeting and parting what a tenderness is in them. For the joy of meeting has come to mix with the sorrows of absence, and the sorrow at parting is dissolving the last joy of being together. And so, whenever we use these words for the concentrated expression of love, they necessarily express tender emotion. How tender is the language of Shakespeare’s patriotism, “ This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land.” And when Shakespeare says, ‘‘Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident,” he is but express- ing the common transition into one another of these oppo- site emotions, yet not so opposite as people think. For both share in a common striving, both tend to maintain their objects in perception or thought. Both, though op- posed in feeling, harmoniously unite. How much less stable is the union of joy and fear. There is something restless in this combination. We are drawn to and away from the object of reverence. The fear in awe must be subdued or it destroys the emotion; on the verge of the precipice the sublime may dissolve in terror. Thus as we consider the evidence as a whole, it is against our concluding that Tender Emotion is simple and primary. Two emotions, at least, have preceded it. It is derived from them and their dispositions; it is not primary. There are many varieties of joy and sorrow, and not all of them in their fusion may produce this emotion. But however this may be, like all products of mental development, like the production of the special sensations from a common sensibility, and of the fundamental types of thought from an undifferentiated awareness, and the types of will from a blind conation, tender emotion cannot be resolved into the components we can still trace in it. The result is not