The Nature and Origin of the Passions in General

The human mind has 2 essential or necessary relations that are very different:

1. Relation to God
2. Relation to its body

As a pure spirit, it is essentially united to the Word of God, to wisdom and eternal truth, that is, to sovereign reason; for it is only through this union that it is capable of thinking, as has been seen in the third book.

As a human spirit, it has an essential relation to its body; for it is because it is united to the body that it feels and imagines, as has been explained in the first and second books. The mind is called sense or imagination when its body is the natural or occasional cause of its thoughts; and it is called understanding when it acts by itself, or rather when God acts in it and His light enlightens it in various different ways without any necessary relation to what passes in its body.

It is the same with the will of man.

As will, it depends essentially on the love that God bears to Himself and on the eternal law, in a word, on the will of God. It is only because God loves Himself that we love something; and if God did not love Himself, or if He did not constantly imprint in the soul of man a love similar to His own, that is, this movement of love that we feel for the good in general, we would love nothing, we would will nothing, and consequently we would be without will; since the will is nothing other than the impression of nature which carries us toward the good in general, as we have already said several times.

But the will, as the will of a man, depends essentially on the body; for it is only because of the movements of the blood, or rather of the animal spirits, that it feels itself agitated by all sensible emotions. I have therefore called natural inclinations all the movements of the soul that we have in common with pure intelligences; and some of those in which the body has a large part, but of which it is only indirectly the cause and the end, I explained in the previous book; and I call here passions all the emotions that the soul naturally feels on the occasion of the extraordinary movements of the animal spirits and of the blood. It is these sensible emotions that will be the subject of this book.

Although the passions are inseparable from the inclinations and that men are capable of some sensible love or hatred only because they are capable of a spiritual love and hatred; it has nevertheless been thought appropriate to treat them separately, in order to avoid confusion. If one considers that the passions are much stronger and more vivid than natural inclinations, that they usually have different objects, and that they are always produced by different causes, one will recognize that it is not without reason that one separates things that are inseparable by their nature.

Men are capable of sensations and imaginations only because they are capable of pure intellections, the senses and the imagination being inseparable from the mind; and yet no one finds fault with treating these faculties of the soul separately, although they are naturally inseparable. Finally, the senses and the imagination do not differ from the pure understanding any more than the passions differ from the inclinations. Thus it was necessary to separate these last two faculties as one is accustomed to separate the first three, in order to better discern what the soul receives from its author in relation to the body from what it holds from Him without this relation. The only inconvenience that will naturally arise from this separation of two things naturally united will be, as always happens in such occasions, the necessity of repeating something of what has already been said.

Man is one, although he is composed of several parts; and the union of these parts is so close that one cannot touch him in one place without moving him entirely. All his faculties hold together and are so subordinate that it is impossible to explain any one of them well without saying something of the others. Thus, in trying to establish an order to avoid confusion, one finds oneself obliged to repeat. But it is better to repeat than to confuse, because one must make oneself intelligible; and in this necessity of repeating, the best that can be done is to repeat without boring.

The passions of the soul are impressions of the author of nature, which incline us to love our body and everything that can be useful to its preservation; just as natural inclinations are impressions of the author of nature, which carry us principally to love Him as the sovereign good and our neighbor without relation to the body.

The natural or occasional cause of these impressions is the movement of the animal spirits which spread into the body to produce and maintain there a disposition suitable to the object that one perceives, so that the mind and the body may help each other in this encounter; for it is by the continual action of God that our volitions are followed by all the movements of our body which are proper to execute them, and that the movements of our body, which are excited mechanically in us by the sight of some object, are accompanied by a passion of our soul which inclines us to will what then appears useful to the body. It is this efficacious and continual impression of the will of God upon us that unites us so closely to a portion of matter; and if this impression of His will ceased for a moment, we would from that moment be delivered from the dependence in which we are on all the changes that happen to our body.

For one cannot understand how certain people imagine that there is an absolutely necessary connection between the movements of the spirits and of the blood and the emotions of the soul. Some small particles of bile move in the brain with some force; therefore it is necessary that the soul be agitated by some passion, and that this passion be rather anger than love. What relation can one conceive between the idea of the faults of an enemy, a passion of contempt or hatred, and the bodily movement of the parts of the blood which strike against some parts of the brain? How can one persuade oneself that the ones depend on the others, and that the union or alliance of two things as distant and as incompatible as the mind and matter can be caused and maintained in any other way than by the continual and all-powerful will of the author of nature?

Those who think that bodies necessarily communicate their movement to each other by themselves at the moment of their encounter, think something plausible. For finally this prejudice has some foundation. Bodies seem to have an essential relation to bodies [1]. But the mind and the body are two kinds of beings so opposed, that those who think that the emotions of the soul necessarily follow the movements of the spirits and of the blood, think something that has not the slightest appearance. There is certainly only the experience that we feel within ourselves of the union of these two beings, and the ignorance of the continual operations of God on His creatures, which makes us imagine another cause of the union of our soul with our body than the always efficacious will of God.

It is difficult to determine positively whether this relation or this alliance of the thoughts of the human mind with the movements of its body is a penalty of its sin or a gift of nature; and some persons believe that it is taking sides too lightly to embrace one of these opinions rather than the other. It is well known that man, before his sin, was not the slave but the absolute master of his passions, and that he stopped without difficulty by his will the agitation of the spirits that caused them. But one has difficulty persuading oneself that the body did not solicit the soul of the first man to seek the things that were proper to the preservation of his life. One has some difficulty believing that Adam did not find before his sin that fruits were pleasant to the sight and delicate to the taste, after what Scripture says of it, and that this economy so just and so wonderful of the senses and passions for the preservation of the body, is a corruption of nature rather than its first institution [2].

Undoubtedly nature is presently corrupted: the body acts with too much force on the mind. Instead of representing its needs to it with respect, it tyrannizes it and tears it away from God, to whom it ought to be inseparably united, and it applies it ceaselessly to the search for sensible things that can be useful to its preservation. The mind has become as it were material and earthly after the sin. The relation and close union it had with God has been lost: I mean that God has withdrawn from it as much as He could, without losing it and without annihilating it. A thousand disorders have followed from the absence or distancing of Him who kept it in order; and, without making a longer deduction of our miseries, I admit that man is corrupted in all his parts since his fall.

But this fall has not destroyed the work of God. One always recognizes in man what God has put there; and His immutable will, which makes the nature of each thing, has not been changed by the inconstancy and lightness of the will of Adam. All that God has willed, He still wills; and because His will is efficacious, He does it. The sin of man has indeed been the occasion of that will of God which makes the order of grace. But grace is not contrary to nature: the one does not destroy the other, because God does not fight against Himself; He never repents, and His wisdom having no bounds, His works will have no end.

The will of God which makes the order of grace is therefore added to the will which makes the order of nature to repair it and not to change it. There are in God only these two general wills, and all that is regulated on earth depends on one or the other of these wills. It will be recognized in the sequel that the passions are very well regulated, if one considers them only in relation to the preservation of the body, although they deceive us in certain rare and particular encounters, to which the universal cause has not wished to remedy. One must therefore conclude that the passions are of the order of nature, since they cannot be of the order of grace.

It is true that if one considers that the sin of the first man has changed the union of the soul and the body into dependence, and that it has deprived us of the help of a God always present and always ready to defend us, one can say that it is sin which is the cause of the attachment we have to sensible things, because sin has detached us from God, by whom alone we can deliver ourselves from their servitude.

But without dwelling any longer on the search for the first cause of the passions, let us examine their extent, their nature, their causes, their end, their use, their defects, and all that they contain.