PHILOSOPHY OF MIND James summed up the findings of the new science in his volumes Principles of Psychology (1890), a work described by Bertrand Russell as possessing ‘the highest possible excellence’ The task of the new psychology was to relate mental events and states to processes in the brain and nervous system James’s textbook introduced the student to the relevant physiology and reported the work of European psychologists on the reaction times of experimental subjects It ranged widely, from the instinctive behaviour of animals to the phenomena of hypnotism For most of the time, James was surveying the work of others; but from time to time he made his own original contribution to the subject James’s most famous innovation in philosophical psychology was his theory of the emotions While his contemporaries strove to find the exact relation between emotional feelings and their concomitant bodily processes, James proposed that the emotions were nothing more than the perception of these processes In The Principles of Psychology he wrote: Our natural way of thinking about coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion Commonsense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble (ii 250) In order to account for the great variety of emotional states, James insisted that there was hardly any limit to the permutations and combinations of possible minute bodily changes, and each one of these, he claimed, was felt, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurred But he was not able to give any independent criterion for the occurrence of such feelings James’s theory of the emotions had been anticipated by Descartes The influence of Descartes is, in fact, all-pervasive in his account of the human mind Nineteenth-century psychologists were anxious to emancipate themselves from the thrall of philosophy; but while their investigations of physiological phenomena produced genuine scientific discoveries, their 200