dercurrent of consciousness, or we might call it a
background. The foreground consists of what you are taking notice of
or thinking about, or of what you are intending to do; that is to say,
the foreground is cognitive or impulsive, or it may be both at once,
as when we are intent on throwing this stone and hitting that tree. In
the background lies the conscious subjective condition. Behind facts
observed and acts intended lies the state of the individual's feeling,
sometimes calm, sometimes excited, sometimes expectant, sometimes
gloomy, sometimes buoyant.

The number of different ways of feeling must be very great, and it
would be no great task to find a hundred different words, some of them
no doubt partly synonymous, to complete the sentence, "I feel
_______". All the {173} emotions, as "stirred-up states of mind",
belong under the general head of the feelings.

But when the psychologist speaks of _the feelings_, he usually means
the _elementary_ feelings. An emotion is far from elementary. If you
accept the James-Lange theory, you think of an emotion as a blend of
organic sensations; and if you reject that theory, you would still
probably agree that such an emotion as anger or fear seems a big,
complex state of feeling. It seems more complex than such a sensation
as red, warm, or bitter, which are called elementary sensations
because no one has ever succeeded in decomposing them into simpler
sensations. Now, the question is whether any feelings can be indicated
that are as elementary as these simple sensations.

Pleasantness and Unpleasantness Are Simple Feelings

No one has ever been able to break up the feelings of pleasantness and
unpleasantness into anything simpler. "Pleasure" and "displeasure" are
not always so simple; they are names for whole states of mind which
may be very complex, including sensations and thoughts in addition to
the feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness. "Pain" does not make
a satisfactory substitute for the long word "unpleasantness", because
"pain", as we shall see in the next chapter, is properly the name of a
certain sensation, and feelings are to be distinguished from
sensations. Red, warm and bitter, along with many others, are
sensations, but pleasantness and unpleasantness are not sensations.

How, then, do the elementary feelings differ from sensations? In the
first place, sensations submit readily to being picked out and
observed, and in fact become more vivid when