'clusters' of Ideas. Social Interdependence and Emotional Complexity in David Hartley's Observa- Tions on Man and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments I from Passion to Feeling

My first hypothesis is that there is a strong interdependence between the nature of emotions and the way they are represented. I should here like to understand 'representation' in an obvious sense, i.e. as a technical term for sensory and neurophysiological processes. For it is not only since Descartes that epistemology has been accompanied by medical models attempting to provide a material basis for psychological phenomena. This is true quite in·· dependent of the arguments of the various philosophical schools. I have spoken of 'interdependence.' On the one hand, emotions somehow seem to be influenced by the physiological channels of expression to which they are allotted -where) according to contemporary science, they get their energy from) how they connect with ideas) how they associate among themselves, what effects they produce in the mind, the body, and the sense organs. One feels in a different way depending on whether one locates the source of these feelings in the humours produced in the abdomen or in the nervous system weakened by advancing civilisation to name the two significant options for the 18th century. On the other hand, the history of these physiological illustrations recapitulates and assimilates the history of emotionality. However materialist the physiologists may portray themselves, they in fact invent physiological processes in order to base on them the actual emotional experiences that arc typi·· cal of their period.