Desire, love, fear, render the most obtuse understanding lucid. Desire, guided by experience, rests upon proved pleasure and pain, seeking one and avoiding the other. Impulse is the primordial fact in the life of the feelings. Spinoza sums up the whole spirit of the question in his passage: ‘Desire is the very essence of man, from which necessarily flow all those things which tend to preserve him’.”
Indeed, philosophers have even dared to speculate that just as DesireFeeling is the essence and kernel of the life of the individual, so a Cosmic DesireFeeling must be postulated as being the very essence and kernel of the Cosmos—of AllNature; in all of her manifestations and forms of expression, inorganic as well as organic. Along this same line are those metaphysical conceptions of the Infinite Power, or Infinite Being, as necessarily having DesireFeeling as its attribute; for, otherwise, it is asked, how may we conceive of the Infinite ever having begun its manifestation and expression of the created world? Say certain metaphysicians: “The Infinite must have felt that Creation was ‘desirable,’ else it would never have created anything at all.” Such speculation, however, is outside of our field here; we have mentioned it merely to illustrate how fundamental is the idea, and how it ever asserts its power in man’s philosophical thinking.
Emotion, then, is perceived to be the great incentive to individual motion and action in human life, at least. It is no longer to be regarded as a merely internal, subjective mental state. On the contrary, it is seen to be the internal phase of a mental activity striving to express itself in outward and external activity. Emotion is well called EMotion. Emotion is an incentive to action—to mental and physical motion. Emotion strives ever to express itself in action. On its lower side, It blends into certain forms of Sensation; on its upper side, it blends into Will.
Emotion is not that manifestation or expression of fanciful, sentimental, neurotic, hysterical feelings or impulses—something to be apologized for by the person manifesting it. Emotion is no more to be gauged by the neurotic, hysterical, hyperemotionality miscalled “emotion,” than is Intellect to be gauged by the fantastic socalled “reasoning” of the inmate of a lunatic asylum, or that of the many “out patients of Bedlam” whom we meet in everyday life. Neither Emotion nor Intellect is to be gauged by the perverted forms of these great mental activities.
Men are accustomed to speak of Intellect as the most potent of the powers of the mind; but they reckon ill who leave out Emotion. Descartes said: “I think; therefore, I am!” But Feeling is even more fundamental than is Thought: and men say with even greater certainty, “I Feel; therefore, I am!” Likewise, we are in the habit of quoting with satisfaction the aphorism: “As a man thinketh, so is he”; but we fail to remember that the actual words of the aphorism are, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Here, “thinketh in his heart,” really means “feeleth in his heart”—for “the heart” is the familiar figurative term employed to denote the seat of Feeling, just as “the head” is employed to denote the seat of Thinking. So, at the last, then, our favorite aphorism is seen to read, “As a man feeleth in his heart, so is he.”
We are here not endeavoring to exalt Emotion over Thought and Will, but are merely seeking to restore to its place in the Trinity of Mind a most important element of the Mental Power of Man which many persons have become accustomed to overlook and neglect. Or, changing the figure of speech, we may say that in Emotion we have that cornerstone of the Temple of Mental Power which has been rejected by many of the modern builders. Without the element of Emotive Power there can be no Motive Power in the human mind.
II
DESIRE AND ACTIONS
DESIRE, AS we have seen, is the crest of the wave of Emotional Feeling. At the same time, Desire may be said to be the elementary stage or phase of Will. Emotion, rising to Desire, tends to become transformed into Will. Before reaching the stage of Desire, we find Emotion manifesting the stage of Affection, under the several forms of the latter known as Love, Liking, Fondness, Attraction, Passion, Admiration, respectively. The spirit of Affection is represented by the phrase, “I like.”
Desire evolves from the stage of Affection, and manifests the inclination to wish, to want, to long for, to hanker after, to crave eagerly, to obtain or to enjoy the object of its Affection. Desire manifests in several forms, as for instance, Aspiration, Ambition, Craving, Hunger or Thirst (employed figuratively), for Attainment; or, the simple ‘Wish or Want. The spirit of Desire is represented by the phrase, “I want.”
Desire, however, only moves toward that to which it is attracted by Affection. It “wants” only that which it “likes.” That which it neither likes nor yet dislikes fails to stir it into activity. That which it dislikes, it positively “wants not”; it seeks to avoid, or to escape from, or to be rid of or free from such things. The degree of Desire depends materially upon the degree of Affection for the object, though other elements enter into the calculation. As Gordy says: “I will to do this, or that, because of some pleasure or benefit—and that, when analyzed, will be found to consist of some form of pleasure which I hope to gain, or of some pain which I hope to avoid.”
Here is the working principle, briefly stated: We entertain an Affection or “like” for that which gives us pleasurable feelings or emotions; we Desire or “want” that for which we entertain an Affection or “like,” i. e., that which gives us pleasurable feelings or emotions; and we Will or “act” to do that which seems to tend to satisfy or accomplish our Desire or “want.” In this working principle we may find the Secret of Action—the workings of the inner machinery of Will which causes us to “do things.” We must find a thing pleasurable in order that we may “like” it; we must “like” it before we may “want” it; we must “want” it before we will move into action to “do things” tending to attain, secure, gain, and accomplish that which will satisfy the Desire.
Desire is stirred into activity, and moves out into expression, only in response to an object—it is moved only by an incentive of an emotional character. Professor Halleck gives us the simple rule in his celebrated statement: “Desire has for its object something which will bring pleasure or get rid of pain, immediate or remote, for the individual or for some one in whom he is interested. Aversion, or a striving away from something, is merely the negative aspect of Desire.”
You will find that all forms and phases of Desire are covered by the above statement. To be Desire, a mental state must include and possess the abovestated elements; if a mental state includes the abovestated elements, then it must be Desire. You are advised to commit the definition, or statement, to memory; and to test your feelings by means of it, when you are in doubt as to whether you desire a thing, or not.
Desire exerts a tremendous influence upon all phases of human action. It is the motive power of Will; the latter tends to move toward the object of the greatest Desire, and to flow through its channels. The Will is always moved by a “motive,” i. e., a cause, or reason inciting to action; and that “motive” always is found in Desire and the ideas attached to it. It is an axiom of psychology that “The Will goes out toward the strongest motive present in conscious or subconscious attention at the time of action.” The “strongest motive” always is that idea representing the object of the strongest desire, or of the aggregate or average of the strongest desires, present in attention at the moment of action.
Desire also plays an important part in our thought, reasoning, and judgments. It quickens our perception, and energizes our thought processes. It is proverbial that our judgments are affected by our feelings, emotions, affections and desires. It has been truly said that most persons, when they seek to reason, strive rather to find “excuses” for their previous decisions, rather than to advance logical reasons for new decisions; the decisions themselves have already been
