underfeeling

plural underfeelings

1. A secondary or subconscious feeling.

   He's forgotten Sheila, in fact, and if he's thinking about friends, it's only a vague underfeeling that he would be really impressive if allied with Virginia Novello.

   2013, Kim Stanley Robinson, The Gold Coast: Three Californias, →ISBN, page 32

   2 more examples

   ‘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.’

   1876, Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta

   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.

   1924, Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not… (Parade's End), Penguin, published 2012, page 92

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of underfeel