English

Noun

underfeeling

1. A secondary or subconscious feeling.
   • 1876, Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta:

     ‘It is from a more general cause: simply an underfeeling I have that at the most propitious moment the distance to the possibility of sorrow is so short that a man's spirits must not rise higher than mere cheerfulness out of bare respect to his insight.’

   • 1924, Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not…, Penguin 2012 (Parade's End), p. 92:

     She had said to him: ‘Oh…a little caviare! A peach!’ a long time before, with the vague under-feeling that the names of such comestibles must convey to her person a charm in the eyes of Caliban.