OBSERVATIONS ON SOME POINTS IN JAMES'S PSYCHOLOGY. II. EMOTION

Nothing in Professor James's work will be likely to strike the average reader as more paradoxical than his views on the subject of Emotion, which he must be allowed to state in his own words. After premising that he will limit his discussion, in the first instance, to what may be called the coarser emotions, as fear, grief, rage, love, in which every one recognises a strong organic reverberation, he goes on to say: "Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression.