ABSTRACT
Emotions are of course responsive to reason, not only in the familiar case in which a change of belief initiates or terminates an emotion. There is a more respectable place in which cognition may be involved with emotion. In the James-Lange theory, emotion is indeed a kind of cognition, but a cognition of the state of the animal system. This is one interpretation of the truth that the feeling of emotion is engendered by the states of arousal or depression of the brain and body. Emotions are adaptations and, in the case of the primary emotions, subserved by the same neural mechanisms in us and in other animals. They are far older than society and language and anything recognizable as values, except in the sense in which nutrients or integrity of bodily tissue are values. They play a clear functional role in the preservation of their possessor.
