dden blanching of the hair,
which has in the minds of most of us been accepted from our earliest
recollection.

More fundamental, however, and vital, is the extent to which we have
overlooked the precise method in which these violent emotional
impressions alter bodily activities, like the secretions. Granting, for
the sake of argument, that states of mind, especially of great tension,
have some direct and mysterious influence as such, and through means
which defy physical recognition and study, it must be remembered that
they have a perfectly definite physiological sphere of influence upon
vital activities. Indeed, we are already in a position to explain at
least two-thirds of these so-called "mental influences" upon purely
physical and physiological grounds.

First of all, we must remember that these emotions which we are pleased
to term "states of mind" are also states of body. If any man were to
stand up before you, for instance, either upon the stage or in private,
and inform you that he was "scared within an inch of his life," without
tremor in his voice, or paling of his countenance, or widening eyes, or
twitching muscles, or preparations either to escape or to fight, you
would simply laugh at him. You would readily conclude, either that he
was making fun of you and felt no such emotion, or that he was
repressing it by an act of miraculous self-control. The man who is
frightened and doesn't do anything or look as if he were going to do
anything, the man who is angry and makes no movement or even twitching
suggesting that fact, is neither angry nor frightened.

An emotional state is, of course, a peculiarly complex affair. First,
there is the reception of the sensation, sight, sound, touch, or smell,
which terrifies. This terror is a secondary reaction, and in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred is conditioned upon our memory of previous
similar objects and their dangerousness, or our recollection of what we
have been told about their deadliness. Then instantly, irrepressibly,
comes the lightning-flash of horror to our heart, to our muscles, to
our lungs, to get ready to meet this emergency. Then, and not till then,
do we really feel the emotion. In fact, our most pragmatic philosopher,
William James, has gone so far as to declare that emotions are the
after-echoes of muscular contractions. By the time an emotion has fairly
got us in its grip so that we are really conscious of it, the
blood-supply of half the org