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The Psychology of Feeling and Emotion will prove a welcome volume to all who are in any way interested in the field of affective psychology. It is both a scholarly and interestingly written book, and should serve to dispel the text-book assertions that we know very little about feeling and emotion. For here are more than 500 pages devoted to these two topics, and most of them packed with substance.
After beginning with an historical perspective, Professor Ruckmick takes up the problem of the range of affective experience, including a definition of its various aspects. In this part, as throughout most of the book, he tries to present the points of view of all schools, though on the essential question as to whether affection is a primary category or merely an attribute of other mental processes, the author definitely espouses the cause of those who hold feeling to be an elementary and fundamental process itself. The various theories of emotion from Darwin through James-Lange, and the very recent ones of Cannon and Kantor, are clearly reviewed and discussed. The author gives the strong and weak points of each, and in a separate chapter presents what may be termed a theory of his own. He calls it a phylogenetic theory of affective life, and formulates it in somewhat the following terms: The aspects of consciousness which we call affective experience were originally only diffuse, objectless feeling, not to be differentiated from primitive consciousness itself. Through processes of unfolding and individuation this diffuse consciousness acquired a specific function. At the level of primitive feelings the whole mind is affectively toned. Later "emotion began to enter, with partial functions emerging gradually from the whole, to take over in various ways the hedonic tone which was primordial." The theory thus represents a biological and evolutionary approach applied to experience from a psychological point of view. In elucidating it, Professor Ruckmick leans heavi