James actually wrote that each instance of emotion, not each category of emotion, comes from a unique bodily state. This is a wildly different statement. It means you can tremble in fear, jump in fear, freeze in fear, scream in fear, gasp in fear, hide in fear, attack in fear, and even laugh in the face of fear. Each occurrence of fear is associated with a different set of internal changes and sensations. The classical misinterpretation of James represents a 180-degree inversion of his meaning, as if he were claiming the existence of emotion essences, when ironically he was arguing against
...more
