ABSTRACT
This chapter makes clear that cognition and emotion are not, for James, radically distinct phenomena or processes. Surveying his use of terminology, it emphasizes his views on the arbitrariness of labels and underscores his refusal to allow a clear definitional separation of cognition and emotion (or feeling and thought). In fact, it shows that cognition is the larger category within which James included both feeling (sensation and emotion) and thinking (conception and judgment), with perception being the process intervening between the two. The review of cognition covers both associative thinking based on contiguity and higher-order analogical thinking based upon the discrimination of similarities between “things.” The chapter also discusses “genius” as entailing superior power of thinking in terms of analogies or similarities. It devotes considerable space to James’s distinctive theory of the emotions, both “coarse” (sensory based) and “subtle” (moral, intellectual, and aesthetic based). It also discusses individual differences in emotions, as related to gender, age, and culture, and notes James’s belief that feelings (including emotion) are more fundamental than thoughts (or reason).
