Emotion and Morals

Abstract

ON Saturday afternoon, March 11, a meeting of the British Psychological Society was held at King's College, London, Mr. A. F. Shand in the chair, when Dr. William Brown read a paper on “Emotions and Morals.”After a brief survey of the views of earlier writers on the nature and classification of the emotions and their relation to ethics, in which, however, the doctrines of Aristotle and Adam Smith (“Theory of Moral Sentiments”) were treated at some length, the author proceeded to discuss the meaning of the terms “passion,” “emotion,” and “sentiment”in relation to the theories of Ribot, Shand, and McDougall. According to ordinary uses of the term, and also to its etymology, passion would seem to indicate an uncontrollable state of mind, in the form either of an actual emotion or a system of emotional tendencies. Although Shand's employment of the term sentiment to express the conception of “a system of emotional dispositions centred about the idea of some object” would theoretically cover the latter of these two uses, passion seems to be a more appropriate and expressive word to indicate those systems which are uncontrollable by the rest of the mind, and issue, under appropriate conditions, in uncontrollable emotions, e.g. “a passion for politics,” “a passion for the stage.”