ABSTRACT
A critic can define poetry with some assurance as “emotion recollected in tranquility,” and the poet can indeed remember how the sounding cataract haunted him like a passion. In order to explain how the passion element enters into the moral life, owing to the incoherent state of psychological science, to put forward some definite view of the part the passions play in the economy of the mind. The case of sex-love illustrates the difference between emotion and instinct. It is in the fruition of the instinct that passion arises, and the passion has in every form an object toward which it is directed, apart from which it cannot exist, and in its highest form the object is uniquely determined. Various psychologists have distinguished the mere passion-mood from the stable passion-disposition, and the distinction is absolutely necessary if we are to understand how the multitude of conflicting emotions of our experience can consist with a stable character and an ordered society.
