ABSTRACT
The logical beginning of a discussion of the psychology of emotion would seem to be a definition of emotion. Unfortunately we are not dealing with an exercise in logic, so we cannot lay down a definition and then deduce further meaning from the terms of the definition. This is what used to be done in the study known as psychology; it may have sharpened men’s wits; it taught them much about the products of the mind but little about how the mind worked. This was a tolerable method when biology was a primitive science concerned only with living creatures other than man. But, as the view developed (culminating in the evolutionary doctrine) that man was a specialized animal, the purpose of psychology began to change. Students began to look on “mind” as a general term covering a group of functions having to do with the adaptation of the organism to its environment. This makes it an instrument, its phenomena data expressible in terms of functions of the instrument. A philosopher might object that this definition is too narrow, that the mind mediates influences more extensive and subtle than the stimuli from any “biological” environment. To this the modern psychologist would reply, if he were an honest man, that he is not pretending to solve the riddle of the universe; that he is deliberately narrowing the scope of his science and that the only bearing which psychology has on metaphysics is to provide knowledge as to the capacity and range of mind. An analogy may make this clearer. A biologist may be studying minute structures with a microscope. Only the science of optics can tell him what range his lenses will have and how much of what he sees will be a product of imperfections in the instrument—as, for instance, chromatic aberrations.
