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  • What does the average teacher of psychology mean when he glibly rattles the words "fear", "rage", "anger", and "sex-emotion"? Almost any literary light of the Victorian era, if asked to define these words, would have answered, readily enough : "They are names for emotions possessing distinctive conscious qualities, experienced by everybody, every day. These easily recognized, primitive emotions constitute the very backbone of literature." I submit that the backbone of literature has been transplanted intact into, psychology, where it has proved pitifully inadequate. The whole structure of our recently christened "science", in consequence, remains spineless in its attempted descriptions of human behaviour. Most teachers of psychology, it would seem, are still unable to define these time-worn emotional terms with greater exactness or scientific meaning than that employed by literary men of the last century.
    Nor can the average teacher be blamed. Theorists and researchers upon whom the teacher must depend for his scientific, concepts have written many hundreds of thousands of words on the subject of emotions, without attempting definite, psycho-neural descriptions of a single basic, or primary emotion. On the other hand, nearly all writers seem to accept the old, undefined literary names of various "emotions" without question ; each writer then giving these terms such connotation as they may happen to hold for him, individually.

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