Reason: The arithmetic of the emotions.

Hubbard’s aphorism casts “reason” not as the enemy of feeling but as a way of measuring and ordering it. Calling reason “the arithmetic of the emotions” suggests that emotions supply the raw quantities of human experience—desire, fear, affection, anger—while reason provides a method for weighing them, comparing consequences, and arriving at proportionate action. The metaphor also implies limits: arithmetic can total and balance, but it cannot replace the lived quality of emotion. In this view, rationality is a practical tool for translating inner impulses into coherent decisions rather than a cold abstraction divorced from the heart.