Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 July 1878 — The Emotions in Education. [ARTICLE]

The Emotions in Education.

One large department of psychology is made up of the classification, definition, and analysis of the emotions. The applications of a complete theory of emotion are numerous, and the systematic expansion must be such as to cope with all these applications. We here narrow the subject to what is indispensable for the play of motives in education.

First of all, it is necessary to take note of the large region of sociability, comprising the social emotions and affections. Next is the department of antisocial feeling—anger, malevolence, and lust of domination. Taking both the sources and the ramifications of these two leading groups, we cover perhaps three-fourths of all the sensibility that rises above the senses proper. They do not indeed exhaust the fountains of emotions, but they leave no other that can rank as of first-class importance, except through derivation from them and the senses together. The region of fine art comprises a large compass of pleasurable feeling, with corresponding susceptibilities to pain; some of this is sensation proper, being the pleasures of the two higher senses; some is due to associations with the interests of all the senses (beauty of utility); a certain portion may be called intellectual, the perception of unity in variety; while the still largest share appears to be derived from the two great sources above described.

The intellect generally is a source of various gratifications and also of sufferings that are necessarily mixed up with our intellectual education. Both the delights of attained knowledge and the pains of intellectual labor have to be carefully counted with by every instructor. The pleasures of action or activity are a class greatly pressed into the educational service, and therefore demand special consideration.

The names self-esteem, pride,, vanity, love of praise, express powerful sentiments, whose analysis is attended with much subtilty. They are largely appealed to by every one that has to exercise control over human beings. To gratify them is to impart copious pleasure, to thwart or wound them is to inflict corresponding pain.— From “ Education as a Science," by Prof. Bain, in Popular Science Monthly for July.