The Science of the Emotions, by Bhagavan Das (1908)

Bhagavan Das · Constitution of Man Series · 274 pages

The complete text of The Science of the Emotions by Bhagavan Das, in the revised and enlarged second edition published by the Theosophical Publishing Society at London and Benares in 1908, and inscribed to Annie Besant, by whose wish and under whose guidance it was written. This is the book the extracts in Confusing Words are drawn from — the analyses of adultery and malice, of devotion against worship, of lust and jealousy, and of laughter and tears all come out of its chapter on the complex emotions — so it is the volume to come to for the system those short files assume.

The argument is built from the ground up. Chapter one takes on the objection that analysis and classification of the emotions are impossible at all, and states the introspective method it will use. Chapter two names the factors: the Self, the Not-Self, pleasure and pain, and attraction and repulsion or love and hate — insisting that this last pair cannot be reduced to one. Chapter three gives the essential nature of emotion, subdividing mind on both Eastern and Western views into cognition, desire and action, defining emotion preliminarily, and identifying love and hate as the two primary forms of desire from which the rest are compounded. Two epigraphs set the temper of the whole: Light on the Path on regarding most earnestly your own heart and the constantly changing life around you, and the Isha Upanishad on him who sees all things in the Self hating no more.

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