The Emotions Author:Carl Georg Lange 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: THE EMOTIONS A PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL STUDY CARL GEORG LANGE, M.D. Professor of Medieine in Copenhagen Translated By Istab A. Haupt From the Authorized Ge... more »rman Translation of H. Kurella, M.D. Kant, in a passage in his Anthropologie, qualifies the affections as diseases of the mind. He considers the mind normal only as long as it is under the incontrovertible and absolute control of reason. Anything that causes it to be disturbed seems to him to be abnormal and harmful to the individual. To a more realistic school of psychology, which knows no abstract "Ideal" man, but rather "takes men as they are," such a doctrine of the soul must appear strange. It must be but a meager conception of man's existence, to consider pain and pleasure, pity and anger, defiance and humih'ty, as conditions foreign to normal life, or even as something from which one must turn away if one wishes to recognize the actual nature of man-kind. A theory which makes the power of admiring the great, of deriving pleasure from the beautiful, and of being moved by misfortune, a disease, results in a limitation of the extent of our mental life. Such a theory will consider the imperturbable arithmetic teacher, to whom every impression is merely an impulse to draw rational conclusions, as the only normal, healthy individual. It is a strange conception of the interaction of mental powers to consider as accidental that which plays a larger and more vital part than normal reason in the mental life of most men, and which determines to a much higher degree than reason the fate of nations as well as of individuals. Who would wish to cure an unhealthy mind, if by so doing he would rob man of all that goes to make him a sympathetic creature; that enables him to share the pleasure and pain of those of his kin...« less