The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.

William James wrote this in the course of formulating what became known as the James–Lange theory of emotion. In the late 19th century, psychology was emerging as an experimental discipline, and James was arguing against the common-sense view that we first experience an emotion and then express it bodily. Instead, he proposed that perception of an “exciting fact” triggers bodily changes (crying, trembling, striking), and the felt emotion is our awareness of those changes. The passage comes from his influential discussion of emotion in The Principles of Psychology, where he uses vivid everyday examples to make a physiological account of feeling plausible and to emphasize the indispensability of bodily feedback to emotional experience.

James is claiming that emotions are not inner mental states that merely cause bodily expressions; rather, the bodily response is primary, and the emotion is the mind’s experience of that response. If the body did not change—no tears, no trembling, no visceral arousal—our “emotion” would collapse into a thin recognition of facts without warmth or urgency. The quote’s significance lies in its reversal of intuitive causality and its attempt to naturalize emotion: feelings are anchored in physiology and perception-action loops. Even where later research complicates the strict sequence James proposes, the idea that bodily feedback shapes affect remains foundational in psychology and philosophy of mind.