"The Stoics in describing the feelings as "indefinite cognitions," had in mind something which in most text-books on psychiatry is not included in the conception of feelings; they thought pre-eminently of intellectual processes. To the scholastics the feelings were either a desire for the good -or an aversion to the bad, in other words pleasure and displeasure, to which was added a certain ethical value, and a special emphasis upon the voluntaristic principle which is always contained in the "feelings." If Hegel calls feeling "intelligence on the threshold of it's immediateness," and Volkmar "the becoming conscious of the degree of tension of ideation," we can not deny that these are words which mean little more than nothing to the practical psychologist, the psychopathologist; nor are we any better off when we take into account the explanations which are always indispensable for the understanding of such "definitions." Kant expressed himself most clearly and correctly on this subject, but without effect upon his successors however, whose conceptions are not much clearer than those of the earlier philosophers."