It may be considered as plausible that if the first feeling was pain, the first emotion was also of the pain character. The first representation of an object as painful induced that reaction of mind which we term an emotion, and the painful emotion we call fear. That the first emotion to appear was fear, as fright, seems likely when we consider that the general alertness and defensiveness imperatively required in the struggle for existence is thereby most immediately and simply attained. The acquirement of the power to become frightened is plainly a most important requisite for self-preservation, and thus is indicated as a very early factor in conscious life. An animal being devoured by another may merely suffer pain without any perception of the object as pain-giving and to give pain; but if it attains this perception, there may be added to the stimulus of simple pain that of fright. The direct actual pain may be but small, and so inducing but feeble reaction, as when some less sensitive portion is being injured; but if there occurs a vivid representation of potential pain, fright happens and stimulates most strenuous endeavours, and so rids the animal both of the immediately and the prospectively painful. Thus emotion acts as a complement to simple feeling, and also secures practically anticipatory reaction. Animals which must receive actual injury before experiencing pain are clearly 94inferior to those which experience emotion-pain before the injury is actually received. Other things being equal, the most easily frightened have, in the midst of many destructive agents, the best chance of survival and of perpetuating their kind.

B. Originally appeared in part in Philosophical Review, i. pp. 241-256.

It is unnecessary to dwell at length on child life and savage life as illustrating the primitive quality and function of fear. The earliest experiences of the child with things are lessons of fear. The burnt child dreads the fire, and thus is enabled to preserve himself from threatened injury. Fear is a primary and most important motive to action in a very wide range of the lower mental life. Those who have observed animals and man in a state of nature are always greatly impressed with the constant and large part which this emotion plays in their consciousness. With the timid and weaker species, like the rabbit and squirrel, it is likely that a majority of their cognitions prompt to fear or are prompted by fear, and with some persecuted races of savages the same may be said.

The necessity and value of anticipatory reaction being acknowledged in the struggle of existence, we plainly see a primitive motive thereto in fear, and the earliest emotional life which we can clearly interpret likewise seems to be fear.

It is sufficiently easy to see the general function of fear and its primitive character, but we find it very hard to make a satisfactory analysis, and to show the exact steps of its evolution. It is obvious, however, in the first place, that fear, like other emotions, is purely indirect and secondary experience; it pre-supposes previous painful experience of the feared object. Pain experienced in connection with cognition of object is the basis of all fear. Animals that have not felt pain from man do not fear him. But fear while thus based on previous direct experience is always hindered by simultaneous direct experience, as, for 95example, sensation. Thus when we, whip in hand, say to a child crying from fear, “I will give you something to cry for,” we imply the law that direct pain and sensation tend to supplant indirect feeling as emotion. This common expression emphasizes the essential representativeness of emotion, its imaginary nature, as also the supplanting power of direct real experience. The sight of the whip inspires fear in the child who has been whipped, but this fear is in the course of a punishment wholly eliminated by the direct pain endured. The direct experience is thus the basis of every fear, but only as it is cognized, and not felt.

The great difficulty in analysing fear is in clearly apprehending the mode in which previous experience is utilized. If we could study in ourselves the genesis of a simple emotion, we should doubtless be enabled to see the steps by which experience reacts upon itself so as to give a reflex form like the emotion of fear, but this is hardly possible. However, cognition is evolved at the instance of pain, and all objects are viewed, not for themselves, but in their feeling significance. Cognition is embedded in feeling, and at first is a mere tone of feeling. Things are not at first known for themselves but solely as sources of present pleasure and pain. Things are perceived in and through the feeling which has stimulated the perception. The immediate feeling value of the object is given by the very origin and process of cognition. When an animal is pained by contact with a sharp rock, and this pain stimulates cognition of the rock, this is solely on the pain account. Repeated experiences enable the percept to arise at stimulus of less and less pain, and so the proper reaction is accomplished more and more economically.

We may say that the order of evolution is this: first, a pain; second, a cognition of pain-giver—“it hurts”—third, emotion about pain-giver, as fear thereof—“I am afraid of it.” Primitive and normal cognition always 96implies emotion as impelling self-preservative action. Knowledge which does not spring into emotion and action is abortive. At first the known is always startling.

The original pain-impelled cognition brings in the painful emotion, primitive fear. And as knowledge has brought in fear, so fear reacts on knowledge, and fearfulness incites to knowing even when the pain from object ceases. Thus before any actual experience of an object it may be known and felt about. Thus that habit of objectivity is formed, of alertness, of a fearful sensing and perceiving, which is noticeable in many animals. A cognitive-emotive, emotive-cognitive life is formed and developed. It is a tremendous stride onward to be able through fearful cognition to wholly pre-perceive and anticipate the injurious, instead of having to suffer it in part before being enabled to get away.

Now primitive fear and all primitive emotion plainly utilizes the past experience as interpreting the future; emotion is about a known potency. Yet it is often stated that emotion is but a summation of revivals of past experience. Having often been burnt by fires that I have coincidently been looking at, it sometimes happens that I see a fire which has not yet harmed me, but still the mere sight affects me with what I call the emotion of fear, which, in closest analysis, means merely the revival of the burning pains associated with this seeing in the past. “I am afraid” equals “I re-experience the pains of burning” by suggestion. Pains faintly re-occurring constitute the painful fear. There is in this mass of re-awakenings no real cognition of experience and no feeling about it as such, no psychosis at the experienceable. And it is certainly true that when a fixed sequence of experiences tend to recur together, there will follow upon the cognition, revival waves of pain before any actual increase of pain is really inflicted in the given case. These waves stand for, and are the echoes of, the former 97real pain sequences of cognition. Thus the perception of a great mass of ice will often cause a shivery feeling, a painful sensation is revived as correlated with former cognition experiences. Even the image or representation, the purely and consciously ideal cognition, may bring in painful feeling, as when I say, “It makes me shiver to think of it.” Here the painful sensation-bringing idea is cognized as such, but the representation here is the occasion of a direct painful sensation, and evidently does not imply fear or other emotion.

While not arising from actual injuries, revivals strengthen both cognition and volition. They have recurred before further hurtful experiences with the fire which originally incited them. These revival pains of previous sequences to the cognition, which are carried along with the present cognition, are real enough in themselves, yet they are objectively anticipatory of actual injury. The whole order of previous experience is by the nature of mind and nervous system re-enacted before the actual injuries are inflicted. It is always a race between mind and nature, but it is a prime function of mind to anticipate practically the movements of nature. Mind by its revival forms accomplishes this, but if it lags in its work the real injuries are mercilessly inflicted by slow but sure nature. When the sequence of revival is quicker than the objective sequence, the reactions anticipate objective order, and thus a manifest economy is achieved. But pain revivals of this kind are not fear, nor is there a real pre-perception. Since the revival forms are, to the observer’s point of view, incentive to anticipatory reaction, psychologists must often, especially with low organisms, mistake them for fear; the animal is often, doubtless, merely suffering revival pains when it appears to be fearing pain. Thus we may suspect that organisms which seem to fear shadows or real objects are often merely suffering revival pains brought up in conjunction with the cognition, and not 98really fearing as result of perceiving feeling quality inherent in the object. Manifestation of pain must often be mistaken for manifestations of emotion, and there is as yet no accurate objective determination for fear or other emotions.

Revival pains are not representations of pains as in some way coming from object. Emotion requires representation, and cannot occur in any presentation or re-presentation chain. True pre-perception is not merely perceiving the thing before its effects in feeling are experienced, but it is a representing the feeling quality of the object before, in any given case, this quality is directly experienced. This obviously rests on past experience, but the connecting of object with pleasure-pain experience is at all times, as before intimated, equally a problem. Emotion and representation are built not of revivals, but upon them perceived as such. At some critical moment, in some rather early period in mental development, a consciousness which was pain plus sense of object, realized, under the pressure of struggle for existence, the feeling quality of the object, and there arose with the knowledge of object as pain-giver the painful emotion. And as soon as object is not merely cognized, but cognized as pain-giver, it may be feared. The moment that object was known as a pain agent, then fear of the object came, and thus true anticipatory action arose. We are said, indeed, to fear objects, to fear men, animals, etc., but, in truth, the fear is never of the object as such, but only in view of its pain agency. The cognizing the experienced and experienceable as such seems then a peculiar and distinct process in fear and in all emotion, a genus apart which cannot be constituted by interaction of simple elements. The growth of mind is largely in multiplying and enlarging the signs of experience.

The connecting once achieved of object with pain, it becomes increasingly easy to cognize the feeling value of 99objects, and before full and extreme pain experience therefrom to pre-react through emotion. Thus emotion saves both direct pain and injury. As it becomes a permanent tendency, and an impulse of consciousness to proceed from all pure feelings to cognition of object, so also to cognition of object in its feeling quality, and thus by inherent tendency it ultimately comes about that there is attaching of pain to various objects cognized, even when there is no immediate experience of pain to be connected therewith. Finally the precedent inciting pains to cognition become such minor factors, and knowledge arises with such apparent spontaneity, that emotion as involving pain significance becomes dominant rather than the immediate pain. An order of consciousness becomes established in which the notable event is emotional cognition of experience values as bringing in permanent emotion rather than an order of pleasure-pain inciting cognition with evanescent emotion. But at the first it is evident that fear was but a slight event in a consciousness which was mainly absorbed in immediate pain experience and some sense of object. It is so habitual and instinctive for us to perceive all things as having feeling value, that it is most difficult to appreciate the standpoint of a consciousness which is just attaining emotion life.

The preliminary elements to simple primitive fear, as expressed by any such phrase as, “it hurts,” are at least four: pain, cognition of object, cognition of the pain, cognition of the pain agency of object. These operations, as being at first successive, do not necessarily imply, however, sense of time. The consciousness of a pain is certainly, at first, consciousness of pain really past, yet not consciousness of it as past. The pain stands as immediately antecedent act to the consciousness which is cognition of it, but sense of experience is not thereby sense of experience in time. The sense of time-relations of experiences is wholly subsequent to the simple sense of experience. All 100experience is, of course, in time, but far from being of time.

An organism, which has suffered knowingly from an object, and so feared, attains at length the power of fearing antecedent to any real injury. This seems to be brought about somewhat in the following manner: If I in any way, as by a pin pricking, rouse a sleeping animal to a cognition of an object which has often injured it, and which it has often feared, immediately there would re-occur the original concomitants of the cognition in the previous cases; there would be pain, cognition of pain, ascription to object, and fear, all merely revivals, and happening most probably before any actual injury, etc., received in the present case. Now these revivals, as ............