ABSTRACT
A fact is never merely registered, it commoves and colours our feelings. The experience which is utterly drab, trivial, blank and meaningless is by that very insipidity framed in its particular feeling-tone. Hence many untrained thinkers, and also some trained and professed thinkers, experience some difficulty in drawing a clear distinction between the cognitive element of presentation and the affective one of pure feeling, between a pain, say, and a sensation. Primitively all affection reduces itself to the feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness, pleasure and pain, comfort and discomfort. Language, being a descriptive, and therefore a purely cognitive, symbolism, can never express feeling; like all art, suggest it. All feeling, whether a ‘physical ’ feeling or an ineffable shade of emotional significance, is the effect of whatever acts upon people. The transition from that diffuse unspacial feeling and acting is, like that from pure feeling to sensation of any kind, definitely traceable to the animal food-quest.
