William James' theory of emotion and the concept of reflex

William James presented his famous theory of emotion that 'we feel sorry because we cry.' He states that common-sense says feeling comes before bodily changes but his true sequence is the opposite, because his hypothesis says 'that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between....' The author, however, has not well understood why one mental state could not be induced by the other mental state. James does not seem to provide any further explanation about this. In his 1884 paper James writes we have already a brain-scheme in our hands whose application are much wider than its authors dreamed. Again he does not provide us with a clear, and simple description what the brain-scheme is. If the brain-scheme was already known widely in the latter half of the 19th century, we may find it in popular textbooks written by the leading physiologists. Ferrier is surely one of the leading scientists on the physiology of the central nervous system at that era and James himself cites his name sometimes in his papers and books. When we see Ferrier's 'the functions of the brain,' we readily notice that there existed two fundamental notions, the functional localization of the brain system and the reflex arcs, the basic element of the central nervous system. After having employed these two notions, James' theory seems to be very simple and persuasive even if his theory could be criticized with the much evidence found later. Since human information processing to James is no more than a series of reflexes, the perception of bodily states must be necessary to inform the brain what the brain ordered to the peripherals. Then, as Cannon (1927) later summarized, an object stimulates one or more sense organs; afferent impulses pass to the cortex and the object is perceived; thereupon currents run down to muscles and viscera and alter them in complex way; afferent impulses from these disturbed organs course back to the cortex and when there perceived transform the 'object-simply-apprehended' to the 'object-emotionally-felt' and as James put it, 'nothing is postulated beyond the ordinary reflex circuit, and the topical centres admitted in one shape or another by all to exist' (James, 1884). In other words, to the author's view, James tried to explain the experience (or consciousness) of emotion solely by reflex and localization. Based on the above notions, James' concept of reflex and the implications for the conditioned reflex are discussed. The 'felt' pleasure and pain play an important role in the non-reflexive type of learning in James' psychology