Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTEB H. Gbneral Principles Of Expression?continued. The Principle of Antithesis?Instances in the dog and cat ?Origin of the principle?Conventional signs?The principle of antithesis has not arisen from opposite tuitions being consciously performed under opposite impulses. We will now consider our second Principle, that of Antithesis. Certain states of the mind lead, as we have seen in the last chapter, to certain habitual movements; which were primarily, or may still he, of service; and / we shall find that when a directly opposite state of mind is induced, there is a strong and involuntary tendency to the performance of movements of a directly opposite nature, though these have never been of any service. A few striking instances of antithesis will be given, when we treat of the special expressions of man; but as, in these cases, we are particularly liable to confound conventional or artificial gestures and expressions with those which are innate or universal, and which alone deserve to rank as true expressions, I will in the present chapter almost confine myself to the lower animals. When a dog approaches a strange dog or man in a ge or hostile frame of mind he walks upright and stiffly; his head is slightly raised, or not much red; the tail is held erect and quite rigid; the hairs le, especially along the neck and back; the pricked ears are directed forwards, and the eyes have a fixed stare: (see figs. 5 and 7). These actions, as will hereafter be explained, follow from the dog's intention to attack his enemy, and are thus to a large extent intelligible. As he prepares to spring with a savage growl on his enemy, the canine teeth are uncovered, and the ears are pressed close backwards on the head; but with the...