What was an emotion in 1884? William James and his critics

Abstract

Undoubtedly the stimulating and highly valuable influence of James' treatment – here as on many other points – has been due to a certain frankness and naive clearness which has concealed in a measure the real complexity of the problem. James Mark Baldwin, ‘The origin of emotional expression’, 610 William James' theory of emotion It should now be clear that Charles Darwin and William James were not the authors of ‘the first studies of the emotions using scientific methodology’. Nor was James the first nineteenth-century thinker to adopt a passive ‘sensational’ or ‘feeling’ theory of emotion; Brown, Spencer and Bain had all done so before him; they had all described emotions as aggregates or effects, whose constituents or causes were sensations. It is no coincidence that William James had spent his youth ‘immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown’; the latter's view of the emotions was at the root of James' own.The ‘feeling’ theory of emotion was, nonetheless, given its most widely remembered formulation by William James: emotions for James were passive mental feelings of movements of the viscera. The most striking thing about James' theory of emotions, and the reason for its lasting fame, was its clarity and simplicity. What was most novel about it was the priority given to the viscera rather than the brain (or indeed the soul) in causing emotional feelings.