experience also
differs in feeling from the other. Our feeling states are thus able to
be divided into certain important classes with more or less distinct
characteristics for each. In one class are placed those feelings which
accompany sensory impulses. The sensations arising from the
stimulations of the sense organs, as a sweet or bitter taste, a strong
smell, the touch of a hot, sharp, rough, or smooth object, etc., all
present an affective, or feeling, side. So also feeling enters into the
general or organic sensations arising from the conditions of the bodily
organs; as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, the
tension of the muscles, hunger, thirst, etc. The feeling which thus
enters as a factor into any sensation is known as sensuous feeling.

=Ideal Feeling.=--Other feelings enter into our ideas and thoughts. The
perception or imagination of an accident is accompanied with a painful
feeling, the memory or anticipation of success with a feeling of joy,
the thought of some particular person with a thrill of love. Such
feelings are known as ideal feelings. When a child tears his flesh on a
nail, he experiences sensuous feeling, when he shrinks away, as he
perceives the teeth of a snarling dog, he experiences an ideal feeling,
known as the emotion of fear.

=Interest.=--A third type of feeling especially accompanies an active
process of attention. In our study of attention, it was seen that any
process of attention is accompanied by a concentration of nervous energy
upon the paths or centres involved in the experience, thus organizing
the paths more completely and thereby decreasing the resistance. The
impulse to attend to any experience is, therefore, accompanied with a
desirable feeling, because a new adjustment between nerve centres is
taking place and resistance being overcome. This affective, or feeling,
tone which accompanies a process of attention is known as the feeling of
interest.

=Interest and Attention.=--In discussions upon educational method, it is
usually affirmed that the attention will focus upon a problem to the
extent to which the mind is interested. While this statement may be
accepted in ordinary language, it is not psychologically true that I
first become interested in a strange presentation, and then attend to it
afterwards. In such a case it is no more true to say that I attend
because I am interested, than to say that I am interested because I
attend. In other words, intere