feeling, the dry mouth, the racing heart, the sharp, harsh breathing,
and the tension of the muscles getting ready for flight from the feeling
of fear, nothing tangible is left. Similarly with sorrow or joy or
anger. Take the latter emotion; imagine yourself angry,--immediately the
jaw becomes set and the lips draw back in a semi-snarl, the fists clench
and the muscles tighten, while the head and body are thrust forward in
what is, as Darwin pointed out, the preparation for pouncing on the foe.
Even if you mimic anger without any especial reason, there steals over
you a feeling not unlike anger.

In a famous paragraph James essentially states that instead of crying
because we are sorry, it is fully as likely that we are sorry because we
cry. So with every emotion; we are afraid because we run away, and happy
because we dance and shout. In other words he reversed the order of
things as the everyday person would see it; makes primary and of
fundamental importance the physical response rather than the feeling
itself.

This has been widely disagreed with, and is not at all an acceptable
theory in its entirety. Yet modern physiology has shown that emotion is
largely a physical matter, largely a thing of blood vessels, heartbeat,
lungs, glands, and digestive organs. This physical foundation of emotion
is a very important matter in our study of the housewife as of every
other living person. For it is especially in the emotional disturbance
that the origin of much of nervousness is to be found, and that on what
may be called the physical basis of emotion.

What can emotion produce that is pathological, detrimental to
well-being? We may start with the grossest, simplest manifestations. It
may entirely upset digestion, as in the vomiting of disgust and