[160] Both the
judgment and the emotions are thus involved in the presentation to the
senses of a situation or object involving possible advantage or hurt,
pleasure or pain. It consequently transpires that the feelings called
out on the presentation of disagreeable objects and their contrary
are very different, and there arise in this connection fixed mental
attitudes corresponding with fixed or habitually recurrent external
situations--hate and love, prejudice and predilection--answering to
situations which revive feelings of pain on the one hand, and feelings
of pleasure on the other. And such is the working of suggestion that,
not alone an object or situation may produce a given state of feeling,
but a voice, an odor, a color, or any characteristic sign of an object
may produce the same effect as the object itself. The sight or smell
of blood is an excitant to a bull, because it revives a conflict state
of feeling, and even the color of a red rag produces a similar effect.
When we come to examine in detail the process by which an
associational and sympathetic relation is set up between the
individual and certain parts of the outside world to the exclusion
of others, we find this at first, on a purely instinctive and reflex
basis, originating in connection with food-getting and reproduction,
and growing more conscious in the higher forms of life.
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