§ 4. Feeling-Tone due to PreFormed Associations. — Acquirement of meaning, complication, and associative reexcitement of organic sensation, play an extremely important part in determining the feeling-tone of perception. "The cawing of a rook ... in itself, is certainly not agreeable. This sound, in the case of those who have lived in the country in early life, and enjoyed its scenes and its adventures, is well known to become a particularly agreeable one. . . . The explanation is that this particular sound, having been heard again and again among surroundings . . . which have a marked accompaniment of pleasure, . . . produces a faint reexcitation of the many currents of enjoyment which accompanied these." * To take a simpler instance, the sight of a delicious fruit may give pleasure more because of previous experiences of taste than because of its appearance to the eye. It is important to note that in such cases it is not merely the feeling-tone, the abstract pleasantness or painfulness which is revived; the feeling-tone of the pleasant perception is determined by previous experience only because the perception itself in its cognitive and cognitive aspect has been modified and developed by this experience. The acquired feeling-tone of the cawing of rooks is the feeling-tone of its acquired meaning. It reexcites a total disposition left behind by previous perceptual experience, and this is the source of its pleasantness. Probably the reexcitement of organic sensations also plays an important part in this instance. In other instances it is very prominent. The sight of food disgusting to the taste may produce actual nausea. The sight of a drawn sword produced in James I. a highly unpleasant organic disturbance. The mere sight of another person sucking a lemon makes some people vividly experience the corresponding organic sensations which may be to them highly disagreeable.

* Sully, The Human Mind, vol. ii., p. 78.