Esthetics

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III FEELING I. AFFECTION Feeling must be defined first in its elementary aspect as affection, and then in its complicated phase as emotion. The term "affection" in modern psychological usage means certain fundamental or elementary aspects of consciousness, namely, pleasantness and unpleasantness. (Some writers add other elements to this list, as "indifference," but the more general tendency seems to be to accept this twofold classification.) We can most easily indicate the nature of affection by comparing it briefly with cognition. Affection and Cognition. All mental processes, according to one view, are divided into two great classes, knowing or the cognitive class, and feeling or the affective class. In the former belong the processes of sensation, perception, imagination, memory, reasoning; in the latter, agreeableness and disagreeableness,' feelings, emotions, moods, passions, sentiments. To distinguish these two classes it is common to say that cognition has an objective reference, that it tells one about the objects, events, conditions of an external world; whereas feeling has a subjective reference, and expresses a personal reaction, or records the subject's manner of receiving a cognitive stimulus. Moreover, cognitive processes can be referredATTRIBUTES OF AFFECTION 29 to some specific sense-organ, while affective processes involve more markedly the organism as a whole. Attributes of Affection. The attributes of affection are intensity, duration and quality. It does not represent spatial extent. In this it is unlike visual, tactile and muscular processes, but is like hearing, smell, taste and some organic sensations. Affection may vary, by many stages, from an extremely intense to a very mild experience. As with sensation, it is proper to speak of a...