ans in our body has been powerfully altered,
and often completely reversed.

To what extent muscular contractions condition emotions, as Professor
James has suggested, may be easily tested by a quaint and simple little
experiment upon a group of the smallest voluntary muscles in the body,
those that move the eyeball. Choose some time when you are sitting
quietly in your room, free from all disturbing thoughts and influences.
Then stand up and, assuming an easy position, cast the eyes upward and
hold them in that position for thirty seconds. Instantly and
involuntarily you will be conscious of a tendency toward reverential,
devotional, contemplative ideas and thoughts. Then turn the eyes
sideways, glancing directly to the right or to the left, through
half-closed lids. Within thirty seconds images of suspicion, of
uneasiness, or of dislike, will rise unbidden in the mind. Turn the eyes
to one side and slightly downward, and suggestions of jealousy or
coquetry will be apt to spring unbidden. Direct your gaze downward
toward the floor, and you are likely to go off into a fit of reverie or
of abstraction.

In fact, as Darwin long ago remarked, quoting in part from Bain: "Most
of our emotions [he should have said all] are so closely connected with
their expression that they hardly exist if the body remains passive. As
Louis XVI, facing a mob, exclaimed, 'Afraid? Feel my pulse!' so a man
may intensely hate another, but until his bodily frame is affected he
can hardly be said to be enraged."

And, a little later, from Maudsley:--

"The specific muscular action is not merely an exponent of passion, but
truly an essential part of it. If we try, while the features are fixed
in the expression of one passion, to call up in the mind a different
one, we shall find it impossible to do so."

It will also be recollected what an important part in the production of
hypnosis and the trance state, fixed and strained positions of these
same ocular muscles have always been made to play. Many hypnotists can
bring their subjects under their influence solely by having them gaze
fixedly at some bright object like a mirror, or into a crystal sphere,
for a few minutes or even seconds.

A graphic illustration of the importance of muscular action in emotional
states is the art of the actor. Not only would it be impossible for an
actor to make an audience believe in the genuineness of his supposed
emotion if he stood glassy-eyed and wooden-limb