one feels in regard to any fact or issue is irrelevant to the question of whether one's judgment is true or false. It is
not by means of one's emotions that one apprehends reality.
One of the chief characteristics of mental illness is the policy of letting one's feelings—one's wishes and fears—
determine one's thinking, guide one's actions and serve as one's standard of judgment. This is more than a symptom
of neurosis, it is a prescription for neurosis. It is a policy that involves the wrecking of one's rational faculty.
It is not accidental, but logical and inevitable, that the predominant emotions an irrationalist is left with —after he
has put this policy into practice—are depression, guilt, anguish, and fear. The notion of the happy irrationalist, like
that of the happy psychotic, is a myth—as any psychotherapist is in a position to testify.
Whether or not they regard their emotions as reliable guides to action, the majority of people tend to regard some of
them, in effect, as primaries, as "just there." Yet the evidence to refute such an error is overwhelming and readily
available.
The mere perception of an object has no power to create an emotion in man—let alone to determine the content of
the emotion. The emotional response to an object is inexplicable, except in terms of the value-significance of the
object to the perceiver. And this necessarily implies a process of appraisal. For example, three men look at a
scoundrel: the first man recognizes to what extent this person, in his craven irrationality, has betrayed his status as a
human being—and feels contempt; the second man wonders how he can be safe in a world where such persons can
prosper—and feels fear; the third man secretly envies the scoundrel's "success"—and feels a sneaking admiration.
All three men perceive the same object. The differences in their emotional reactions proceed from differences in
their evaluation of the significance of what they perceive.
Just as emotions are not created by objects of perception as such, so they are not the product of any sort of innate
ideas. Having no innate knowledge of what is true or false, man can have no innate knowledge of what is good for
him or evil. A man's values—to repeat—are a product of the quantity and quality of his thinking.
An emotional response is always the reflection and product of an estimate—and an estimate is the product of a
person's values, as the person understands them to apply to a given situation.