uction of those painful impressions which before followed
man's approach; that such ideal reproduction becomes more vivid and more
massive as the painful experiences, direct or sympathetic, increase; and
that thus the emotion in its incipient state, is nothing else than an
aggregation of the revived pains before experienced. As, in the course
of generations, the young birds of this race begin to display a fear of
man before yet they have been injured by him, it is an unavoidable
inference that the nervous system of the race has been organically
modified by these experiences: we have no choice but to conclude that
when a young bird is thus led to fly, it is because the impression
produced on its senses by the approaching man, entails, through an
incipiently-reflex action, a partial excitement of all those nerves
which in its ancestors had been excited under the like conditions; that
this partial excitement has its accompanying painful consciousness; and
that the vague painful consciousness thus arising, constitutes emotion
proper--_emotion undecomposable into specific experiences, and therefore
seemingly homogeneous_.

If such be the explanation of the fact in this case, then it is in all
cases. If emotion is so generated here, then it is so generated
throughout. We must perforce conclude that the emotional modifications
displayed by different nations, and those higher emotions by which
civilized are distinguished from savage, are to be accounted for on the
same principle. And concluding this, we are led strongly to suspect that
the emotions in general have severally thus originated.

Perhaps we have now made sufficiently clear what we mean by the study of
the emotions through analysis and development. We have aimed to justify
the positions that, without analysis aided by development, there cannot
be a true natural history of the emotions; and that a natural history of
the emotions based on external characters can be but provisional. We
think that Mr. Bain, in confining himself to an account of the emotions
as they exist in the adult civilized man, has neglected those classes of
facts out of which the science of the matter must chiefly be built. It
is true that he has treated of habits as modifying emotions in the
individual; but he has not recognized the fact that where conditions
render habits persistent in successive generations, such modifications
are cumulative: he has not hinted that the modifications produced by