it depends on the pleasure derived from contact with a beloved person.
The evidence with respect to the inheritance of nodding and shaking the
head, as signs of affirmation and negation, is doubtful; for they are
not universal, yet seem too general to have been independently acquired
by all the individuals of so many races.
We will now consider how far the will and consciousness have come into
play in the development of the various movements of expression. As far
as we can judge, only a few expressive movements, such as those just
referred to, are learnt by each individual; that is, were consciously
and voluntarily performed during the early years of life for some
definite object, or in imitation of others, and then became habitual.
The far greater number of the movements of expression, and all the more
important ones, are, as we have seen, innate or inherited; and such
cannot be said to depend on the will of the individual. Nevertheless,
all those included under our first principle were at first voluntarily
performed for a definite object, namely, to escape some danger, to
relieve some distress, or to gratify some desire. For instance, there
can hardly be a doubt that the animals which fight with their teeth,
have acquired the habit of drawing back their ears closely to their
heads, when feeling savage, from their progenitors having voluntarily
acted in this manner in order to protect their ears from being torn by
their antagonists; for those animals which do not fight with their
teeth do not thus express a savage state of mind. We may infer as
highly probable that we ourselves have acquired the habit of
contracting the muscles round the eyes, whilst crying gently, that is,
without the utterance of any loud sound, from our progenitors,
especially during infancy, having experienced, during the act of
screaming, an uncomfortable sensation in their eyeballs. Again, some
highly expressive movements result from the endeavour to cheek or
prevent other expressive movements; thus the obliquity of the eyebrows
and the drawing down of the corners of the mouth follow from the
endeavour to prevent a screaming-fit from coming on, or to cheek it
after it has come on. Here it is obvious that the consciousness and
will must at first have come into play; not that we are conscious in
these or in other such cases what muscles are brought into action, any
more than when we perform the most ordinary voluntary movements.
With respect to the expressive movements due to the principle of
antithesis, it is clear that the will has intervened, though in a
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