Classics in Psychology

Robert H. Wozniak - Bryn Mawr College

Alexander Bain: The Emotions and the Will (1859)

The Emotions and the Will is the sequel to Alexander Bains seminal text, The Senses and the Intellect. 28
Like its predecessor, it was for many years the most widely read English language treatise on the topic. Also
like its predecessor, it was thoroughly associationistic in approach, taxonomic in form, and
psychophysiological in content. Focusing especially on the latter two divisions of his tripartite classification of
mind into intellect, feeling (including sensation and emotion), and will (including the link between feeling and
action), Bain presented a much broader treatment of emotional and volitional phenomena than was typical for
the period. He also conceptualized belief in a novel and influential fashion.
The first section of Bains book was devoted to the emotions. It began with a seminal discussion of the nature
of emotion that not only stressed the importance of the muscular movements, secretions, and other organic
changes that accompany mental states, but explicitly recognized the necessity of supplementing introspection
with the observation of expression in the study of emotion. In his emphasis on emotional expression, Bain
came close to the view that would eventually become known as the James-Lange theory of emotion. In the
James-Lange theory, the subjective character of emotion was held to be identical to the experience of the
bodily changes directly precipitated by an emotion-producing event. 29
Bains view, which was more moderate, was that emotional expression enters as one, albeit a crucial,
component of the subjective experience of emotion. The fundamental proposition, respecting Emotion
generally, he wrote, (is that) the state of Feeling, or the subjective consciousness which is known to each
person by his own experience, is associated with a diffusive action over the systema wave of nervous
influence(affecting) the moving members. Some of these are more readily agitated than othersfor
example, the features of the face; which therefore constitute the principal medium of the expression of feeling.
But observation shows that all parts of the moving system are liable to be affected by an emotional wave
The emotion of Fear, for example, would not have its characteristic mental development if the currents from
the brain to the moving organs and viscera were arrested. What we take merely as signs of the emotion are a
part of its own essential workings, in whose absence it would be something entirely different. 30
Besides pointing to expression as a central feature of emotion, Bain identified aspects of subjective
experience such as pleasure, pain, and excitement, differences among the stimulants to emotion, and
characteristic actions and consequences as features that differentiate among emotions. On the basis of this
featural typology, he went on to treat the data on emotion according to what he liked to call his Natural
History Method. Nowhere in his voluminous writings was his predilection for botanizing clearer than in his
taxonomy of the emotions into eleven broad families further subdivided into species.
Among the more notable aspects of this discussion were Bains treatment of the emotions of terror and
intellect. The common source of terror, he pointed out, is uncertainty: Nothing more readily dissolves the
composure of the frame than the sense of the unstable, or insecure(such as) the giving way of the bodily
supportany breach of expectation is eminently discomposing.
In this he anticipated later views typically associated with John B. Watson (loss of support) and Donald B.
Hebb (breach of expectation). His description of the expression of terror, published thirteen years before
Darwins treatise on emotional expression, 31 was remarkable in its detail. Terror, he wrote, is seen in the
stare of the eyes, elevation of the eye-brows, and inflation of the nostrilin the hair standing on end under
the increased action of the muscle of the scalp, and in the contraction or creeping of the skina convulsive
clench of the handthe dropping of the jawthe loosening of the sphinctersloss of appetitethe general
convulsive tremorthe cold sweat and the pallor of the skin
The emotions of intellect were those accompanying operations of intelligence such as the contiguous train of
associations, recog-nition of similarity, discovery, or problem solution. Bains treatment of these emotions is
most often cited for his emphasis on the pleasure associated with the first recognition of similarity (i.e.,
analogical thinking) and the pain and intellectual revulsion attendant upon exposure to contradiction. Bain
even approached the modern concept of cognitive dissonance in describing the minds tendency to resolve

contradiction by abandonment of one of the contraries, orrepudiationof both

32

After dealing with emotion, Bain turned to will. His theory of will is perhaps best known, thanks largely to the
criticism it received from William James,33 for ascribing the springs of human action exclusively to pleasure
and to pain. Bains approach to will, however, was far more important for the fact that it not only conceived of
volition in terms of the link between feeling and action but gave explicit recognition to the circular mechanism
by which this link becomes established in experience. As Bain described it: An acute pain is a strong
stimulant, under which every action that we are predisposed to is made more intense. In the course of these
excited spontaneous discharges, a movement happens that makes the pain to ceaseat the beginning of
conscious life, a first coincidence of this nature amounts to very little. But let the thing happen a second, third,
or fourth time, and important consequences will ensuethe mind is alive to the coincidence of this with
decreasing or vanished pain 34 Both Baldwin and Piaget later made fundamental use of this concept. 35
Finally, The Emotions and the Will is also well known for Bains statement regarding the nature of belief.
Belief, he wrote, has no meaning, except in reference to our actionsthe primordial form of belief is
expectation of some contingent future about to follow on our actionaction is the basis and ultimate criterion
of belief. 36 As has been amply documented, this conception of belief served a pivotal role in Charles
Sanders Peirces formulation of pragmatism. 37
28

Bains dates are 18181903; for biographical information on Bain, see Bain, A. (1904). Autobiography.
London: Longmans, Green. The work under discussion here was first published as Bain, A. (1859). The
Emotions and the Will. London: John W. Parker and Son. The first volume in what Bain liked to call his
Systematic Exposition of the Human Mind (see Bain, op. cit., p.iii) was Bain, A. (1855). The Senses and the
Intellect. London: John W. Parker and Son.
29

See, for example, James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology (Vol. 2). New York: Henry Holt, p. 449.

30

Bain (1859), op. cit., pp. 5, 910.

31

Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal. London: John Murray. Bain had, of
course, ready access to Charles Bells classic treatise on expression, Bell, C. (1806). Essays on the Anatomy
of Expression in Painting. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, which he cites; but his descriptions of
emotional expression go well beyond those of Bell. It would be interesting to know whether he was familiar
with the other major work on emotional expression of the period, Piderit, Th. (1858). Grundstze der Mimik
und Physiognomik. Braunschweig: Vieweg und Sohn.
32

Bain (1859), op. cit., p. 200, 205.

33

James, op. cit., pp. 54955.

34

Bain (1859), op. cit., p. 352.

35

Baldwin, J.M. (1895). Mental Development in the Child and the Race. Methods and Processes. New York:
Macmillan; Piaget, J. (1936). La Naissance de lintelligence chez lenfant. Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestl.
36

Bain (1859), op. cit., pp. 56970.

37

Fisch, M.H. (1954). Alexander Bain and the genealogy of pragmatism. Journal of the History of Ideas, 15,
41344.
Extracted from Classics in Psychology, 18551914: Historical Essays
ISBN 1 85506 703 X
Robert H. Wozniak, 1999
Classics in Psychology, 18551914 Historical Essays - Contents
Classics in Psychology, 1855-1914