The entire complex of feelings, thoughts, and expressions we may call an "emotion."

According as the elements of liking or those of disliking predominate, we have agreeable emotions, such as pleasure and joy, or disagreeable ones such as chagrin and sorrow. Strangely enough our language has no term for that most common emotion: the opposite of pleasure. Suppose that you unexpectedly find an autograph letter of George Washington among old papers in your attic; this would give you great pleasure. Now suppose that you lose it: your emotion would be what? You might say "sorrow," but the emotion is certainly not the same as if you had heard of the death of a parent. "Pain?"-the emotion has no resemblance to the sensation of pain from the point of a needle except in having the element of dislike in it. "Displeasure" might be the term, but it is used only when the opposite of pleasure refers to some one's act.

The predominance of the feeling of stimulation or depression produces the stimulant and depressant emotions; to the former belong joy and anger, to the latter sorrow and fear. The feeling of tension predominates in the tonic emotions, joy, anger, terror; that of relaxation in sorrow and despair.

We

Under "moods" we may classify conditions of mind that colour all our thoughts, emotions, and acts. find two characteristic principles in the moods. The first we may term "tonality;" its positive extreme is "exaltation," its negative one "depression." The other we may term "activity," with "excitability" as one extreme and "apathy" as the other.

Excitability indicates over-readiness to respond to stimuli of all kinds: impressions, thoughts, feelings. Apathy indicates lack of response.

Exaltation shows itself in increased facility and rapidity of thought, in preponderance of the positive feelings (liking, stimulation, tension), in increased rapidity and energy of action, increased estimation of one's self, in optimistic views of persons and events,

etc.

Depression is characterised by the negative feelings in slowness and difficulty of thought, in weakness, uncertainty, and slowness of action, in self-depreciation.

CHAPTER XVII

ATTENTION

HAT is this difference between attention and

WHAT

inattention, between expectation and surprise? How can we turn inattention into attention?

When you first move into a new neighbourhood, you notice every house, every tree, almost every stone, as you pass to and fro. As you grow accustomed to the surroundings, you gradually cease to notice them. Finally you pay so little heed to them that you are unable at the end of a walk to tell what you have just seen by the way. This fact is expressed by saying that at first you attended to what you saw and afterwards did not.

I can illustrate this process of attention in another way. You are now reading the sentences on this page; you are giving full attention to what I say. But at the same time you are receiving touch impressions from the book in your hand and from the clothes you wear; you hear the waggons on the street or the howling of the wind and the rustling of the trees; you smell the roses on the table. Now that I have mentioned them you notice them-or pay attention to them. When you were attending to what you were reading, they were only dimly present.

I will suppose that you are attending to what you

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are reading; all those sounds, touches, smells, etc., are only dimly in the field of your experience while these words are in the focus (or burning-point) of experience. Probably you can gain a good idea of the difference

between the focus and the field of present experience by taking an analogy from the art of photography. When the ground glass of a camera is adjusted so that the picture of a person in the middle of the room is sharply seen, all the other objects are some

what blurred, depending on their distance from him. When the position of the glass is changed by a trifle, the person becomes blurred and some other object becomes sharp. Thus for each position of the glass there is an object, or a group of objects, distinctly seen while all other objects are blurred. To make one of the blurred objects distinct, the position of the glass must be changed and the formerly distinct object becomes blurred.

In like manner we fully attend to one object or group of objects at a time; all others are only dimly noticed. As we turn our attention from one object to another, what was formerly distinct becomes dim.

The illustration with the camera is not quite com

plete. You can keep the objects quiet in the room, but you cannot keep your thoughts still. The mental condition would be more nearly expressed by pointing the camera down a busy street. You focus first on one thing, then on another. The things in focus pass out of it, others come in. Only by special effort can you keep a moving person or waggon in focus for more than a moment.

Let us ask a few practical questions.

In the first place, How many objects can be attended to at a time? Objects can, of course, be more or less complicated. A house, for example, is a single object if we do not look into the details; it is a multitude if we count the windows, doors, roof, chimneys, etc., as separate objects. By the word "object,” then, we will understand any thing or group of things regarded as a single thing. Thus, the natural tendency would be to regard the letters MXRV as four objects, namely, four letters, whereas MORE would be regarded as one object, namely, a word, unless we stop to consider the letters separately.

Experiments are made by exposing pictures, letters, words, etc., to view for a brief time. One way of doing this is to prepare slides for the projection-lantern and throw the view on the screen for an instant.

A more convenient way is to fix the pictures or letters on cards or to prepare a table on which actual objects are placed. A photographic camera with a quick shutter is aimed at them. The person experimented upon is so placed that he cannot see the objects, but can see the ground glass. Various other methods for brief exposures have been used.