Reason's Heartbeat, The Contested Union of Intellect and Emotion

“ Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine. He who is immersed in what concerns person or place cannot see the problem of existence. This the intellect always ponders. Nature shows all things formed and bound. The intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness between remote things and reduces all things into a few principles.
The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. ”

“ The emotions are conceived to be purely private and personal, having nothing to do with the work of pure intelligence in apprehending facts and truths,—except perhaps the single emotion of intellectual curiosity. The intellect is a pure light; the emotions are a disturbing heat. The mind turns outward to truth ”

“ Intelligence is conversant with truth; truth, as necessary and universal, is not the creature of my volition; and reason, which, as the subject of truth, is also universal and necessary, is consequently impersonal. We see, therefore, by a light which is not ours, and reason is a revelation of God in man. The ideas, therefore, of which we are conscious, belong not to us, but to absolute intelligence. They constitute, in fact, the very mode and manner of its existence. For consciousness is only possible under plurality and difference, and intelligence is only possible through consciousness. ”

“ Intellect belongs to our higher nature, and emotion belongs to our lower. Intelligence is always at a discount where the emotional nature governs—it is subordinated to passion. When the intellect governs, the emotional is subjected to thought ”

“ That [39] indescribably small interval is as good as a thousand miles, and has forever severed the practical unity. Such is the immense deduction from power by discontinuity.
The intellect that sees the interval partakes of it, and the fact of intellectual perception severs once for all the man from the things with which he converses. Affection blends, intellect disjoins subject and object. For weal or woe we clear ourselves from the thing we contemplate. We grieve but are not the grief; we love but are not love. ”

“ Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear consideration of abstract truth. The considerations of time and place, of you and me, of profit and hurt, tyrannize over most men's minds. Intellect separates the fact considered from you, from all local and personal reference, and discerns it as if it existed for its own sake. Heraclitus looked upon the affections as dense and colored mists. In the fog of good and evil affections, it is hard for man to walk forward in a straight line. ”

“ All other pleasures that are not of the intellect are of a lower kind; for they are, one and all, movements of will—desires, hopes, fears and ambitions, no matter to what directed: they are always satisfied at the cost of pain, and in the case of ambition, generally with more or less of illusion. With intellectual pleasure, on the other hand, truth becomes clearer and clearer. In the realm of intelligence pain has no power. Knowledge is all in all. Further, intellectual pleasures are accessible entirely and only through the medium of the intelligence, and are limited by its capacity. ”

“ Your intellect or mind is the 'little reason' it is the tool of your body—the creating body created the mind as a hand of its will—your body and its instincts is the 'big reason.' "I am wholly body and nothing else; and soul is but a word for something belonging to the body." "There is more reason in your body than in your wisest wisdom." Mind or knowledge has value only in so far as it makes for life, in so far as it helps you. ”

“ The worshipper of energy is too physically energetic to see that he cannot explore certain higher fields until he is still.
Even if such a race had somehow achieved self-consciousness and reason, would they have been able therewith to rule their instincts, or to stop work long enough to examine themselves, or the universe, or to dream of any noble development? Probably not. Reason is seldom or never the ruler: it is the servant of instinct. It would therefore have told the ants that incessant toil was useful and good. ”

“ It may be that the knowledge of things through pure intellect is pure delusion, that to pigeon-hole the universe is to make it into a cemetery. Instead of that “love is blind,” the truth may be that only love sees. There is a sense in which every mother’s babe is the most beautiful in the world.
Knowledge, then, as a mere function of the intellect, is only the dead knowledge that appears in school-books. But who shall say that knowledge was meant to be only a function of the intellect, that we do not know with our heart and soul as well as with our brains? ”

“ Nay, it is even true that the most cultivated intelligences, capable of criticising evidence and valuing arguments to a nicety, are not thereby made rational to the extent that they are guided by intellect apart from emotion. Continually men of the widest knowledge deliberately do things they know to be injurious; suffer the evils that transgression brings; are deterred a while by the vivid remembrance of them; and, when the remembrance has become faint, transgress again. Often the emotional consciousness overrides the intellectual consciousness absolutely, as hypochondriacal patients show us. ”

“ Your naturalness is something that you don't have to know. You just have to let that function in its own way. Your wanting to know that demands some know-how, which you want from somebody. The functioning of the heart is a natural thing; the functioning of all the organs in your body is very natural. They are not for one moment asking themselves the question "How am I functioning?" The whole living organism has this tremendous intelligence which makes it function in a very natural way. ”

“ Moreover, in all these cases the emotion is excited by an external sensation which touches a spring and sets the mechanism of instinct at work; so that it might be argued that we are not here concerned with a pure and independent state of feeling. To remove all doubt, we require cases in which the state of feeling precedes the intellectual state, not being provoked by, but, on the contrary, provoking it.
The child at the beginning can only possess a purely affective life. ”

“ But emotion is, as we have seen, the very soul itself, poured forth in its profoundest essence, and eternally divided against itself in the ultimate duality. Emotion is the psychic element which is the real substratum of sensation, just as it is the real substratum of reason and taste. So that when the will concentrates itself, as it has so often done and so often been commended for doing, upon sensation alone, it is neglecting and betraying its main function, which is the repressing of malice and the liberation of love. ”

“ Although, as was shown in the last paper, the intellect, as the result of superior brain-development, is the one leading attribute that distinguishes the human race from all other races and constitutes man, still, it was not developed at the expense of, or as a substitute for, his affective faculties, but pari passu with them and as an aid to them. It is therefore clear that it is these affective attributes that hold the first place and constitute that to which all others are subservient. Intellect is not an end in itself. ”

“ The spirit of the species is what it ever was and ever shall be, violent and capricious. Now, just as formerly, instinct remains stronger than reason. Our superiority over the ancients lies less in the knowledge of it than in proclaiming it. We have within us a force capable of creating worlds, to wit, desire, and you would have us regulate it. ”

“ The history of instincts is never the explanation of them. If we could unravel clearly all the history of the instincts of all peoples as regards the after death, we should be no nearer an explanation of why the instinct exists at all, why it grows or decays, why it takes one form or another. But we might, as so many do, blind ourselves to the fact that instincts exist now quite apart from reason, either now or previously. No reasoning can explain the absolute clinging of the European peoples to the resurrection of the body. ”

“ Originally carried out with consciousness and reflection, many instinctive actions of the animals have become unconscious, as have, in like manner, the ordinary acts of intelligence in man. These too, may, with the same justice, be regarded as the expression of innate instinct, as often is the impulse to self-preservation, maternal love, and the social impulse. Instinct is not an exclusive attribute of the animal-brain, nor is reason an especial endowment of man ”

“ By a like process of observing old impressions mentally, he will not only witness the phenomena of human life, but will undergo the appropriate emotion even before the phenomena are realized, the emotion leading up to the idea. ”

“ It is common to distinguish between the intellect and the conscience, between the power of thought and virtue, and to say that virtuous action is worth more than strong thinking. But we mutilate our nature by thus drawing lines between actions or energies of the soul, which are intimately, indissolubly bound together. The head and the heart are not more vitally connected than thought and virtue. Does not conscience include, as a part of itself, the noblest action of the intellect or reason? Do we not degrade it by making it a mere feeling? ”

“ Feeling is always more convincing than intellect. Intellect is full of theories, notions and superstitions. But where you find deep feeling combined with knowledge, you will find reason directed by qualities which pass through the surface and attain the heart-throbs of the real.
There are many kinds of emotion. There is the hard emotion of anger, the confused emotion of fear, the painful emotion of jealousy, the indescribable emotion of despair, the radiant emotion of joy. But the greatest emotion of all is that of knowledge united to feeling. ”

“ If a man’s feelings are small feelings, they are in the way in science, as a matter of course. If he has large noble ones, feelings that match the things that God has made, feelings that are free and daring, beautiful enough to belong with things that a God has made, he will have no trouble with them. It is the feelings in a great scientist which have always fired him into being a man of genius in his science, instead of a mere tool, or scoop, or human dredge of truth. All the great scientists show this firing-process down underneath, in their work. ”

“ For you and those like you mistake the power of reason, you have forgotten its limitations. Reason is but the power of arranging facts, it cannot provide them. Your eyes will give you the facts they can see, your ears what they can hear, your sympathies will give you the realities of men's lives. If you have no emotions, no sympathies, how can you get on? ”

“ There are men of keen intellect who comprehend some philosophic system, who will defend it with elaborate reasonings and proclaim themselves its adherents, but the earth at their feet, the stars in the firmament, man himself and their own souls have undergone no transfiguration. Their philosophies are lifeless, for imagination is to the intellect what breath is to the body. Thoughts that never glow with imagination, that are never applied to all that the sense perceives or the mind remembers—thoughts that remain quite abstract, are as empty husks of no value. ”

“ You exalt reason into the whole of life, committing the mistake for which you rail on others. Unbridled emotion is, as you say, terrible. So is unbridled reason. Where has reason alone ever led anyone save into the dreariest, driest pessimism? Was a philosopher ever a happy man? Even your Utopias, from Plato's to Bellamy's, who would desire them? Hell would be a pleasant relaxation after any of them. The functions of the senses, of which sympathy is the greatest, are to give you facts, the function of reason is to arrange them. The emotions drive man forward, reason directs and controls them. ”

“ In other words, he has the power to choose between his desires, and this power depends largely upon the ideals which he has incorporated into his life by the complexes and sentiments which compose his personality.
Ideas and Ideals. If emotion is the heart of humanity, ideas are its head. In our emphasis on emotion, we must not forget that as emotion controls action, so ideas control emotion. But ideas, of themselves, are not enough. Everybody has seen weaklings who were full of pious platitudes. Ideas do control life, but only when linked up with some strong emotion. ”

“ Emotion often quickens the perception, burns things indelibly into the memory, and doubles the rapidity of thought. On the other hand strong feelings often vitiate every operation of the intellect. They cause us to see only what we wish to, to remember only what interests our narrow feeling at the time, and to reason from selfish data only. * * * Emotion puts the magnifying end of the telescope to our intellectual eyes where our own interests are concerned, the minimizing end when we are looking at the interest of others. ”

“ ON VARIOUS KINDS OF THINKING The truest and most profound observations on Intelligence have in the past been made by the poets and, in recent times, by story-writers. They have been keen observers and recorders and reckoned freely with the emotions and sentiments. Most philosophers, on the other hand, have exhibited a grotesque ignorance of man's life and have built up systems that are elaborate and imposing, but quite unrelated to actual human affairs. They have almost consistently neglected the actual process of thought and have set the mind off as something apart to be studied by itself. ”

“ Because, if sense, uncompanioned by intellect, can furnish any knowledge, why can it not furnish all knowledge, to the mind? That smashing question supersedes intellect, and an extravagant sensualism is enthroned. Again, if intellect, unaided by the senses (that is, by certain modes of apprehension, either the same as, or different from, ours) , can supply any knowledge to the mind, why need it look to the senses for any of the materials of cognition? An excessive intellectualism—a wild idealism—is the result ”

“ This capacity for reflection, for formulating a purpose and being able to obtain it, we found to be practical in its origins, but persisting on its own account in the disinterested inquiry of philosophy and science and the free imaginative construction of art. And in all man's behavior, whether on the plane of instinct, habit, or reflection, we found action to be accompanied by emotion, by love and hate, anger and awe, which might at once impede action by confusing it, or sustain it by giving it a vivid and compelling motive. ”

“ We are not concerned, in thought and passion, with opposites, but with an opposition which a single phenomenon develops through manifold action and reaction with the rest of the world of phenomena. The distinction is merely a convenience in finer investigations; there is, in fact, as little thought without emotion as emotion without thought. And since emotion always manifests itself as will, this highest opposition is best defined as that of thought and will. In order to understand the human being, we must analyze these two sides of consciousness. ”

“ From time to time, in later ages, brilliant examples have appeared of men who have possessed both instincts in a high degree and have even fused the two together, while among the humble in spirit and the lowly in intellect it is probable that in all ages innumerable men have by instinct harmonised their religion with their intelligence. But as the accumulated experiences of civilisation have been preserved and handed on from generation to generation, this free and vital play of the instincts has been largely paralysed. ”

“ Thought is in its essence impersonal and detached, instinct is in its essence personal and tied to particular circumstances: between the two, unless both reach a high level, there is a war which is not easily appeased. This is the fundamental reason for vitalism, futurism, pragmatism, and the various other philosophies which advertise themselves as vigorous and virile. All these represent the attempt to find a mode of thought which shall not be hostile to instinct. ”

“ How is this emotional or moral want to be supplied? for humanity cannot progress intellectually beyond objective knowledge, without the development of the moral attributes. We venture the assertion that if the same advancement had been made in the development of the emotional attributes of the spirit, as has been in the intellectual, there would have been no agnosticism, and science would be far in advance of what it is. ”