CHAPTER XI.

THE IMPORTANCE AND PLACE OF EMOTION
IN HUMAN LIFE AND THE SOURCE
OF ITS POWER.
Bearing the facts set forth above in mind, it is not difficult to see that all life is only an and aU unfoldment of the possibilities of Emo- literature, tion-desires and Emotion-feelings. Every fnVof ° page, every paragraph, every sentence Emotion, of every book of literature, directly em-
in one bodies a phase of emotion. And it may
aspect. J
be said, in a certain sense correctly, that
such is the case with even every book of science, though indirectly, for the direct object of such is the collection of cognitions and not the representa- tion of emotions. Very instructive exercise is it for students to try to specify these phases of Emo- tion. For literature is only a representation of actual life, more or less accurate. And every action, every movement, every spoken word, of every individual human being, and again his whole life
PLACE OF EMOTION. 195
considered as a unity and in the mass, will be found to represent one ' ruling passion, ' if he be pro- perly studied.
Even as a single atom acted on simultaneously by the motions of millions upon millions of other atoms has one motion, which is the single resultant of all these numberless motions plus its own special motion, so the whole of every human life may be reduced to a unity of Emotion-desire and Emotion-feeling. And from this standpoint, as mere object of observation and study, each life, each phase of Emotion, stands on a level with all others. The picking and choosing amongst them comes later. For the time, the student only sees that Emotion-desire stands at the very centre of life ; immediately directs all actions and movements whatsoever, as means of its own gratification ; and indirectly guides the collection of cognitions, the acquisition of knowledge, as means to the proper performance of those actions.
From this standpoint, the life of an emperor of
continents, the history of a conqueror Equality °* nations, the path of a Teacher of the of all worlds, is on the same level with the
life of a nameless beggar, of a long- forgotten victim of proud tyranny, of the most ignorant of the ignorant. Each represents one of the infinite phases of the Abstract Self, Pratyagatma, in Relation with the Not- Self, Mulaprakrti.
196 SCIENCE OF THE EMOTIONS.
That such and such a particular one of all these phases, looms most largely before the gaze of a nation or a race, at any one time and place, is only part of the arrangement by which each phase gets its due turn. So long as humanity is different- sexed it will remain true that :
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of love,
And feed his sacred flame. r
It is the same with other Emotions. There comes a time in the life of every Jiva Despite ex- when the Self insists on exercising its variation, omnipotence in the startling phase of the power of suicide, of denying and killing itself, when it says : u Only the Not-Self is ; only matter is ; there is no such thing as I, as the Self, the Spirit ;,eat, drink, and be merry, for to- morrow we die," There comes another time when it runs to the opposite extreme of belittling and denying the Not-Self, and says:" There is no such thing as matter at all ; no such thing as Not-Self ; all is Spirit, all is I ; " and it adds : " Take no thought for the morrow," drawing the same con- clusion from infinitely different premises— the truth, as ever, lying between.
Thus, various phases of Emotion have their reign and dominance in human story by turns, and the literature of the day reflects them.
1 Coleridge : Ode to Love.
PLACE OF EMOTION. 197
But, apart from this general importance of Emotion in life, what is the special working of source °f ^s power in particular instan- imagina- ces, what is the special food on which Emotion Emotion-desire nourishes itself and grows overpoweringly strong so as to sweep away reason— on ever so many occasions in life ? This food is imagination. It has been gene- rally remarked that imagination is an essential factor in all the more remarkable forms of Emotion. Thus, there is no horror where there is no imagi- nation ; an actual battle-field, with thousands slaughtered, is not so horrible as a mysterious murder. The reason of this is to be found in the very nature of Emotion as explained in chapter iv. and the laws which govern its provocation as stated in chapter ix. An Emotion is a desire plus an intellectual consciousness. Where the desire does not find immediate vent in action, it works in and around the intellectual consciousness, as expecta- tion, as imagination, and thereby gathers strength in the manner described in the course of chapter x. But that strength is, because of the very manner in which it gathers, not real, true, and enduring strength, and when sought to be utilised in action it very often fails. This is very noticeable in much modern urban life. Because of the increase of intelligence, life has become largely emotional— in theosophical terminology, the astral consciousness is developed highly — and immense amounts of
198 SCIENCE OF THE EMOTIONS.
misery and happiness are gone through by human beings for causes purely airy— as they would be called from the standpoint of the physical body. A very slight physical matter, some careless piece of behavior or mismanagement of affairs, entirely unimportant and trivial in itself, is made the basis of a large amount of imagined pleasant or painful situations and consequences and resulting pleasant- ness or unpleasantness. It should be noted that some basis, however slight, in physical conduct, is absolu- tely indispensable. The attempt to separate Emotion
and hold it apart altogether from Sense is anTsense- as ^u^^e as *ne Deleaver to give a value objects. to money apart from the things it can
purchase. As the true use and destiny and fulfilment of the latter is purchase of articles, so the true fulfilment of the being of the former is wholesome, righteous vent in action in actual life. The non-recognition and non-realisation of this essential fact is the reason why, so very frequently, so-called spiritual loves i begun with-
1 See, in this connection, the footnote at p. 57, supra , as to other reasons why love passes into lust and vice versa. It must be obvious from all that has gone before that there are three main types of love, the parental, the conjugal, and the filial. What is vaguely called spiritual or non-physical or * pure ' love, when analysed, will always be foimd to come under either the first or the third. But, it is clear, Neither is, in reality, wholly devoid of material considerations, in the strict sense, for the simple reason that spirit and matter do not exist
PLACE OF EMOTION. 199
out definite ideals or with hazy ones, gradually descend into hysterics and idiocy, or, worse still,
into sexual immorality and crime ; and results of lar§e fortunes accumulated by un-far- f alse sighted parents for mere miserliness and
ments avarice, and not applied to righteous
human needs, find their end in the dissipations of profligate descendants.
apart from each other. Also, in these circumstances, the parental and filial types of love, where not fixed by blood- bonds and conventions, tend to pass into the conjugal, and, vice versa, the latter to diverge into the two others, for reasons involved in the equalising and ' unifying ' power of love, and in the separating power of lust-oppression, taken together with the fact of each Jiva's alternation between pravrtti and nivrtti, egoism and altruism. For instances, see the des- cription in the Padma Pnrdna of how the rshis, holy saints and sages, by excess of (filial) devotion to Vishnu, became the wives of Krshna in a later birth ; or, in Thackeray's Esmond of how a lady out of excess of (parental) affection, married a young man who had all along regarded her as a mother and called her so. It has been generally noted, that before mar- riage, a certain amount of contrast of feature and nature is necessary in order that young man and young woman may feel attracted towards each other ; it has also been observed correctly, that after a certain number of years of married life, happily matched couples tend to resemble each other in nature and even features. Both these observations are correct, and the reconciliation apparently lies in what has been said above, of the gradual natural changes of types of love from one to another in normal individual lives. The psycho-physical explanation of the unblessedness of incestuous
200 SCIENCE OF THE EMOTIONS.
The power of l soulful ' eyes, the source of many a young person's distractions, of eyes ' pen- sive and melancholy,' of glances ' fascinating ' or * weird ' or ' serpent-like,' of looks ' suggestive ' or 1 speaking whole volumes,' is exactly this, that they
marriages at the present stage may also probably be found in these same considerations. At this stage, when the ' separa- tive,' egoistic, intelligence is sharply developed, a certain amount of ' lust ' proper with its involved separateness, oppo- sition, contrast, and the breaking down and overpowering of that opposition, (disguised, of course, and putting on the form of supplementation of each other, otherwise love and union would become impossible) is apparently necessary to a normal and fruitful marriage ; for so only is the whole of all the two-sided constitution of each spouse brought into play. To these psychological circumstances, there will probably be found to correspond, on further investigation, organic chemico-physical affinities and antipathies between the individuals concerned. In these considerations will also be found the explanation of why love, unreciprocated, so often turns into active dislike — simply, because the desire to receive material pleasures in exchange is defeated. Self- deception, and the endeavor to convince others, is very common on this point : ' My love is pure ; I want nothing ; I want only affection in return.' But ' affection in return ' means absolutely nothing else than the actual services and deeds and material pleasures and presents and sensations (however distant and subtle) that go with and realise affec- tion. To understand this is to possess the means of resisting the wrong emotion, the tendency to hate and anger in such cases, by persistently remembering that the involved selfish- ness is unworthy of a JIva on the path of renunciation.
PLACE OF EMOTION. 201
are ' suggestive ' of indefinite possibilities, and ' speak whole volumes '—but when required in actual daily domestic life to throw all these ' sug- gestions ' and l speeches ' into actualities, they naturally often fail woefully, and false expectations are properly disappointed. A single copper has often sufficed to build a castle, but only in the air ; it will not buy one meal in common life.
As to what the significance is (for even exag- gerated sentiments and castle-building being facts, ought to have a significance), from the point of view of evolution, of the endeavor to withdraw the emotions from the senses, the endeavor to live in the emotions rather than the senses, when such
an endeavor is extensively observable develop- m a ^arge c^ass °f humanity, e.g., in an ment of excess of imagination and literature
over action, an excess of fine-drawn
oCilSGS)
thro' high sentiment about an impossible spiritual condition absolutely free from all touch of matter — that significance seems to be that that class is seeking netv senses in which to vent its emotions, the present ones having grown stale ; that biological changes in the physi- cal constitution of the race are impending.
Notice, in the current literature at the end of the nineteenth century, how the sex problem is being threshed out from all points of view, and how its sensuous and actual side is being thrown more and more into the background by the
202 SCIENCE OF THE EMOTIONS.
mere Emotion-feeling element ; how the feeling of ennui and weariness is spreading more and more ; how there seems to be steadily growing, amongst men and women of culture and intelligence r a sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction with the present order and arrangement of nature. If this sense of dissatisfaction and weariness were to grow sufficiently strong and extensive, then it is conceivable that after the lapse of ages, after many relapses into the old conditions and temporary revivals of satisfaction and pleasure in them, radical changes in the physical constitution of man and his surroundings might come about, and humanity go back again through the bi- sexual to the a-sexual condition, with corresponding entire modification of the details— not the essentials— of intellectual and emotional constitution also, as some of the ancient books teach us.