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Chapter
PERCEPTION
DOI link for PERCEPTION
PERCEPTION book
PERCEPTION
DOI link for PERCEPTION
PERCEPTION book
ABSTRACT
Our subjective sensations, or " feelings present to us our motives and emotions. We are well aware of our likes and dislikes and the various motives into which they enter ; our emotional crises and changes are, indeed, the most poignant of our conscious experiences, although they leave fainter traces behind them than our sensations of sight and touch. Our awareness of them includes some objective elements, as of muscular bracings, relaxings and tremblings, and changes in breathing, circulation and secretion ; we are in fact conscious, not only of animative conditions, but of their physical accompaniments. From these material elements arose the oldfashioned notion that certain emotional crises were connected with particular organs of the body, as love with the heart, courage with the liver, jealousy with the spleen, and compassion with the bowels. But these objective feelings are merely incidental. Our consciousness of a motive or emotion is one of a condition in itself, and not merely of its objective consequences. For we know that these are in themselves unable to produce a " feeling The force of habit, for instance, produces objective consequences which enable us to infer its existence. But, being unemotional, we are quite unaware of its power and persuasiveness, and do not realize that we owe to it the great mass of the beliefs and convictions upon which we pride ourselves.