FEELING 89
which the reflexes and instincts give us our primary adapta tion; but it is the universe as it has been penetrated, ex plored, investigated, organized and interpreted by the col lective activity of men throughout the ages. The ignorant man s mental organization correlates him only with the cruder, more obvious and sensuously insistent elements of this universe, and his emotional life must be of a correspond ing order. The mental organization of the cultured man correlates him, according to the grade of his culture, with a broader realm of that universe and with aspects of it that do not so immediately force themselves on the senses with the achievements of men in modifying its crude ele ments to serve their practical and ideal ends, with the higher and fine interpretations of it which have been given by the thinkers, seers, poets and saints of the human race. Mani festly the stimulus which perhaps awakens in the mind no emotional response at all or only an immediate and spas modic motor reaction attended with little thought and a low intensity of feeling-tone, may evoke in a man of culture a long series of ideas to which his soul responds in an equally long series of feeling-tones, like a great organ under the hand of a master of harmonies. There is as much difference between the emotional life of a man of high culture and that of the rustic as between the harmonies that may be evoked from a modern grand pianoforte and the rude melodies struck from the ancient dulcimer. Ribot says that " a sav age, even a barbarian, is not moved by the splendours of civ ilized life, but only by its petty and puerile sides." 1 "" The mental system of the savage is so poor in content and so low in organization that the most glorious achievements of civil ization, its social institutions, its sciences, arts, philosophies, religions, call forth in him no ideational and, therefore, no emotional response, not even a healthy and stimulating wonder; and among the denizens of this civilization there are variations in emotional capacity, based upon the gra dations of mental organization, which, without great exag-
1 " The Psychology of the Emotions," p. 190.
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