Essay on the Passions

By adding this new volume to the two previously published on the psychology and the logic of feelings, I am attempting to present an almost complete picture of affective life.

I make no rash claim to be writing a Treatise on the Passions, which would require years of work, especially since I could draw on only a few monographs conceived and carried out according to contemporary methods.^P1 Despite the prevailing prejudice, the subject of the passions deserved a separate study, and I hope to have provided one without repeating the works just mentioned. Moreover, pathological psychology, now flourishing, seems to invite this attempt and promise it some support: the numerous studies of the nature of fixed ideas and obsessions may shed light on our subject.

My purpose is to define the boundaries of this class of phenomena, systematically omitted on the pretext that the word “passion” is vague and elastic. Is the term “emotion,” currently in favor, not even more so? The question is whether there are distinctive manifestations of human life that can be grouped under this particular heading. To establish this, I have confined myself to three points: to determine as precisely as possible the characteristics peculiar to the passions and the elements that constitute them; to trace their genealogy by connecting them with the primitive tendencies from which they arise, and to show how their varieties can be explained by changing combinations; and finally, to investigate why and how they end.

Previously, in studying creative imagination, I tried to counter an inexplicable tradition that seems to confine it to aesthetics and the sciences, although every manifestation of human activity, including politics, commerce, religion, practical and mechanical invention, and war, offers examples of imaginative construction as remarkable as those of art. The same applies to the passions: a small number are always cited and serve as models for psychological descriptions. I have tried to widen this circle, without claiming to give a complete enumeration and without falling into the error of those who, in the last century, turned almost every affective phenomenon into a passion.

This study will also help to show, if that is necessary, that introspection and experiment alone are insufficient to establish a psychology of feelings. Without history and biographical documents, we never move beyond vague generalities, and the life of passion, in its varieties and concrete reality, remains closed and inaccessible.

Although the study of the passions is as old as the earliest speculations of philosophy, I do not hesitate to take it up again here, but in a particular, restricted form, within limits that will be precisely defined. Two main reasons seem to me to justify this study.

The first is that, although the passions cannot all, and in every respect, be described as illnesses, they sometimes come so close to them that the distinction is almost imperceptible and the comparison becomes unavoidable.

The second reason is that the term has fallen out of use, without good reason in my view, and is virtually absent from contemporary psychology. I have investigated this point carefully. I consulted some twenty treatises, written in various languages and enjoying public favor for various reasons, and found that barely two or three devote a few short pages to the passions. The reader will excuse me from supplying a list of names that would serve no purpose. In many authors, the word ‘passion’ does not occur even once (Bain, W. James, and others). Others mention it in passing, only to confuse it with ‘emotions’ or feelings in general, maintaining that emotions and passions are interchangeable terms. Still others merely observe, rightly enough, that it is a vague and elastic expression; they do not seem to imagine that it could be made precise. There are only very rare exceptions to this universal neglect.¹

In the seventeenth century, in Descartes and Spinoza, and even later, the expression ‘passions of the soul’ had so broad a meaning that it was equivalent to what we now call affective states, embracing almost the whole life of feeling. Today, however, the word has been erased from psychology or survives only as an everyday expression. As far as I have been able to establish, this exclusion originated in England and was imported from there. Bain’s Emotions and Will and Darwin’s celebrated work on the expression of the emotions seem to me to have exercised a decisive influence in this respect.²

This identification of emotion with passion, two distinct forms of affective life, seems to me unfortunate and likely to confuse an already very muddled terminology. More precisely, one form has been absorbed entirely into the other, whose name becomes the general term. There is an undeniable difficulty in using the same word, ‘emotion,’ both for affective states great and small, violent and moderate, fleeting and persistent, simple and complex, and for particular phenomena with their own distinctive characteristics, such as fear, anger, sorrow, and so on. This is no more reasonable than applying the same term to a genus and its species in a scientific classification.

The current tendency to deny the passions a chapter of their own in psychological treatises has been a step backward. As early as the end of the eighteenth century, Kant drew a clear, precise, definite distinction between passion and emotion in an often-quoted passage of his Anthropology (book III, § 73). ‘Emotion,’ he says, ‘acts like water breaking through its dam; passion, like a torrent cutting its bed ever deeper. Emotion is like an intoxication one sleeps off; passion, like an illness arising from an impaired constitution or an ingested poison, and so on.’ Kant’s position, now abandoned, must be taken up again, but with the methods and resources of contemporary psychology, and without the excessive claim that all passions are illnesses.

The purpose of this study, then, is to resist the prevailing current.

For clarity of exposition, I divide the manifestations of the life of feeling into three groups: affective states properly so called, emotions, and passions. I do not claim that this division is beyond criticism, but ask that it be accepted provisionally for its explanatory value.

1. There are affective states that express the appetites, needs, and tendencies inherent in our psychophysical constitution. They make up the regular and ordinary course of life, which for the average person consists neither of emotions nor of passions, but of states of low or moderate intensity. This description is admittedly vague, but I can find no other.

To be more precise: the pleasant or painful states connected with the satisfaction of our nutritional or other needs, the exercise of our sense organs, our relations with other people, the perceptions or representations of aesthetic or scientific value that chance offers us in passing, religious aspirations, and so forth, all form the regular and ordinary content of our daily affective life. What should we call these many states, once, by hypothesis, every emotion and passion has been excluded? The most general term seems the most suitable: feelings, or affective states. Of course, since feelings do not exist in the abstract, each of these thousands of states that arise momentarily in consciousness has its own forms and particular composition, varying with the object of the feeling, the nature of the person who feels, and the place and moment. Thus sympathy or antipathy receives different names according to whether it is directed toward parents, children, friends, compatriots, foreigners, and so on, and according to whether it is habitual or accidental, weak or strong. The common feelings that recur most frequently have names in languages with some degree of civilization; beyond them lie those that remain unnamed because they are rare, elusive, or strictly individual. Our languages, developed chiefly for intellectual needs and the exchange of ideas, are inadequate to express fully what is felt. Examples could be given: it has rightly been argued that, among mystics, erotic language is sometimes only an appearance resulting from the impossibility of conveying distinctive feelings in ordinary speech.³ Expression proceeds by analogy, and analogy invites misunderstanding.

2. Emotion is characterized by beginning with a shock, a disturbance of equilibrium. It is the sudden, abrupt reaction of our egoistic instincts, such as fear, anger, and joy, or our altruistic instincts, such as pity and tenderness. It consists chiefly of movements or inhibitions of movement: a synthetic phenomenon, confused because it springs from the unconscious depths of our constitution and is accompanied by only a low degree of intelligence. Conscious knowledge appears only as the emotional disturbance subsides. Such are anger, the sudden frenzy of love, and the surge of pride. Emotion is defined by two principal characteristics: intensity and brevity. I shall not undertake a detailed analysis, which would be unnecessary for our subject, especially since several contemporary psychologists have done it very well,⁴ and we have treated the subject elsewhere.

3. Passion has other characteristics. For the moment, it is enough to say that it contrasts with emotion through the tyranny or predominance of an intellectual state, an idea or image, and through its relative stability and duration. In a word, and subject to certain qualifications to be made later, passion is a prolonged and intellectualized emotion that has necessarily undergone a transformation as a result of those two changes. The further we advance in our study, the more clearly we shall see that emotion and passion, despite a common foundation, are not merely different but opposite.

Emotion is a primary, unprocessed state; passion is a secondary and more complex formation. Emotion is the work of nature, the immediate result of our constitution; passion is partly natural and partly artificial, being the work of thought and reflection applied to our instincts and tendencies. Emotion contrasts with passion as, in pathology, an acute condition contrasts with a chronic one. The comparison can even be carried further: like a chronic illness, passion has unforeseen flare-ups that return it to the acute form, that is, to the tumult of emotion. A lasting passion is always interrupted by bouts of emotion.

Let us note that this is not a mere dispute over words, but a necessary attempt to draw distinctions. The harder it is to establish clear divisions in the elusive and continually changing world of feelings, the more desirable it becomes at least to bring out certain manifestations of affective life that seem to possess their own distinctive characteristics, and to consider them separately. In the psychology of intelligence, we do not confuse perception, image, and concept, although perception is sometimes submerged in its accompanying images, and the image sometimes borders on the concept. Let us do the same in the psychology of feelings: I hope to show that the passions, in their typical forms, have stable characteristics and deserve a separate chapter in a complete study of affective life.

As we enter our subject, we must define its limits rigorously. The aim of this work is not a descriptive study of the passions, but an essay in general psychology, which we shall confine to the following questions: how passions arise, how they take shape, and how they end.

The birth of the passions results from internal and external causes.

I. A few words will suffice for the external causes, which are the least important and the best known.

1. First come the conditions of the external environment and the accidental circumstances that favor the emergence or expansion of a tendency still in embryo, in a latent state; or, to put it less mysteriously and more precisely, a tendency too little active to be noticed. The influence of external causes is inversely proportional to the strength of the predisposition, the internal cause. If that predisposition is strong, a chance occurrence or fleeting accident is enough; if it is weak, external influences must be repeated. This is equivalent to what happens with intellectual vocations, in painters, musicians, mathematicians, mechanics, and so on: the latent tendency, like the latent vocation, responds to an external stimulus, bursts forth, and makes its way.

2. Imitation. This is the source of many passions, which last as long as they can: some gradually die out, while others take root forever. Tarde's distinction between imitation of custom, which is stable, and imitation of fashion, which is ephemeral, applies very well here. If the word were not liable to ambiguity, one could say that there are innate passions, strong and enduring, and acquired passions, weak and short-lived.⁵ Great passions owe little to imitation and remain fundamentally identical in every time and place. As for the others, history could supply some curious observations on their variations according to the fashion of the age. Love is one example. It also seems to me that in our own day the passion for money has taken the form of ostentation and extravagance rather than avarice, although the tendency from which it springs remains the same.

3. Suggestion is undoubtedly a form of imitation, but differs from it in part. In imitation, the initiative to repeat comes from the imitator; in suggestion, the initiative comes chiefly from the external cause, whatever it may be, acting on the person subjected to it. This external cause may equally be a person or a thing, or even something as slight as a piece of reading. Recall its influence on the origin of amorous, aesthetic, military, and other passions. It acts even on children.⁶ In any event, suggestion deserves special mention because it is the source of collective passions, aroused by religious, political, or social questions, or even simply by some sensational affair. Besides imitation, these passions require that element of ferment peculiar to crowd psychology, without which there is no mental contagion.

II. The internal causes are the only true causes, and fundamentally there is only one: the individual's physiological constitution, temperament, and character. Since this is the real origin of the passions, the source from which they spring, it deserves fuller treatment.

Considered as an affective being, a person is a bundle of needs, tendencies, desires, and aversions connected with organic or conscious life; together these form an important part of the person's total individuality. We may regard it as very probable, if not certain, that all these tendencies exist in a normal person, meaning that they can manifest themselves under appropriate conditions. Take a coarse, uneducated, narrow-minded peasant. Nutritional needs, eating and drinking; sexual appetite; the offensive and defensive instinct of self-preservation; some family and social tendencies; a childish curiosity of little scope, which is a form of intellectual feeling; a collection of superstitious beliefs; and a vague aesthetic need satisfied by tales, crude pictures, or songs: such is roughly the whole of his affective equipment, corresponding to an equivalent intellectual equipment. However humble this specimen of humanity may be, he possesses a complete affective life. If none of these tendencies stands out, if all remain at the same level of mediocrity, he exemplifies the amorphous type and lacks the affective characteristic we are seeking, namely passion. But if any tendency, toward love, gambling, drinking, or something else, emerges and becomes prominent, we have the first elements, the embryonic form, of a passion. This amorphous type is not imaginary. Even if no absolute instance exists, some people come very close to it, including people whose intellectual level is higher than that of our peasant.

Although the existence of such people cannot be disputed, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that most people rise above this neutral coloring.

The physical organism is an arrangement of tissues, organs, and functions that theoretically constitute a perfect harmony. Yet most often the heart, lungs, stomach, intestinal organs, brain, nerves, and muscles do not possess the same vital energy. They differ from one another in strength or weakness, and differences of this kind form part of the basis of the doctrine of temperaments. The same applies to the mental organism: one or more tendencies usually prevail and give the individual an affective stamp, clearly apparent to those who observe or know that person. In ordinary life we express this through such phrases as a disposition toward joy or sadness, expansiveness or inward concentration, kindness or hatred, timidity or boldness, love or coldness, generosity or avarice, and so on. These terms characterize the individual in affective life, just as energetic, weak, slow, hurried, lazy, and similar terms characterize active life. This predisposition, innate or acquired very early through imitation, expressing the whole individual or the greater part of that person, is called mood by some English psychologists and Stimmung by the Germans; I render it as affective mode. This general disposition, however, is very different from passion, which is a specialized state. It is only the soil in which passion germinates.

To give greater precision to the question posed above, how does a passion form, it seems useful to reduce passionate people to two types: the person with a single passion, and the person with several passions, simultaneous or successive. This division is somewhat schematic, since it neglects intermediate cases, but it seems to cast some light on this complex subject.

The person with a single passion corresponds to what some writers on character call a unified type. In this case, however, unity results from hypertrophy rather than harmony. This rarer type is generally that of the great passionate individuals. Usually the tendency asserts itself early and so vigorously that everyone, or at least the perceptive, can tell what direction this predestined person will take. Here passion appears in all its simplicity and justifies the familiar definition: the exaggeration of a tendency. To avoid oversimplifying, let us note that a single tendency means one that towers so far above the others that it almost reduces them to nothing: Napoleon's love of power, for example.

People with several passions, simultaneous or successive, are more complex and more frequent. Their distinguishing feature is an extreme sensitivity that responds to every event, but that can produce states entirely different from passion. Ordinary language, and even psychologists, call them sentimental, emotional, impulsive, or passionate, somewhat at random, as though these expressions were synonymous. They are not, and the facts permit clear distinctions:

1. Sentimental people live in the realm of reverie, or scarcely leave it. They are not, and cannot be, passionate people, because they lack a fixed aim and the energy to act. Their aspirations contain few motor elements. Truly passionate people are not dreamers.⁷

2. Emotionally impulsive people are commonly confused with passionate people, although their distinguishing features are different and even opposite. Impulse, which is sometimes an explosion, expresses the hypersensitivity of the sensory centers, the excessive tension of the motor centers, and the weakness of the inhibitory centers. The instability of shallow, changeable, wandering tendencies without a fixed aim prevents the formation of an enduring state, and therefore of a passion. Such are the unbalanced people of every kind encountered almost everywhere; such, too, are many well-known figures in the fine arts and literature who are wrongly described as passionate: Alfieri, Byron, Berlioz, and E. Poe. Biographical documents reveal them rather as unstable, sensitive people who expend themselves in impulses. Transitional forms must nevertheless be admitted. Even on this shifting ground, passions can arise, endure, and coexist with impulsive disturbances: Mirabeau seems to me an example. It has also been maintained that Alfieri had one passion, hatred, which lasted throughout his life while changing its object.

3. With these cases excluded, there remain passionate people, whose distinctive characteristics will be studied in detail below and can be summarized as follows: “What makes passion is not merely ardor or the strength of tendencies; it is above all the predominance of the stability of a particular tendency, exalted to the exclusion and detriment of the others. Passion is an inclination that grows excessive and, above all, establishes itself permanently, makes itself the center of everything, subordinates the other inclinations, and draws them after it. Passion is, as has been said, in the realm of sensibility what the fixed idea is in the realm of intelligence” (Malapert, work cited, p. 229).

Yet one obscure point remains in the origin of the passions: how does one passion rather than another arise from that vigorous and apparently homogeneous affective foundation that is their favored ground?

In many cases, especially with weak passions, considerable weight may be given to the external causes enumerated above: environment, education, and chance. But this explanation is unacceptable for great passions, which seem to arise spontaneously. I can see only an answer by analogy, through comparison with the disposition that physical pathology calls a diathesis. Although several authors maintain that in reality there is only one, consisting in the insufficient oxidation of nutritional waste and the accumulation of the products of this incomplete combustion, in practice different forms are recognized: arthritic, scrofulous, cancerous, nervous, and so on. A passion that absorbs an entire life can arise only from an analogous congenital disposition; that is why we said above that it is innate and ineradicable. Physiologically, an insignificant external cause that has no effect on a healthy person acts on someone with a diathesis in the direction of that diathesis. Psychologically, a trivial event that would have no hold on a cool, reflective character acts on a predisposed person along the line of least resistance. It awakens the latent tendency, which erupts under this slight shock, as though spontaneously, just as in our intellectual life a memory or an idea arises without any discernible cause. However slight the event, it supplies a determining impulse. But instead of producing the diffuse state characteristic of the sentimental person, or the multiple and variable explosions characteristic of the emotionally impulsive person, it directs the passionate person's affective life into a single channel, where it flows between banks, through a vigorous drainage that dries up everything else.

To complete this survey of the causes or conditions of the birth of the passions, we shall add a few words on unconscious influences, which properly belong among the internal causes. Since in recent years the term unconscious has been made “the great panacea for all psychological and philosophical difficulties,” and is often used ambiguously, I declare that I use it only to designate a fact known to everyone, without concerning myself with its ultimate nature, whether psychological or physiological.⁸

We can distinguish two principal forms of these unconscious influences, leaving intermediate forms aside.

The first is more properly subconscious. Examples include certain affective states that have been called organic emotions and that seem to me identical with the phenomena of instinct. Baldwin has studied some of them, notably organic shyness, a differentiation of fear, in the very young child. “These emotions,” he says, “first arise before we have time to see that they relate to our self. They seem connected solely with the physical organism, and so closely bound by heredity to the structure of the body that they serve to protect us from harm or secure advantages for us without the aid of reflection.” Reflection comes later and inaugurates a second phase, in which emotion is no longer merely organic. We may place under the same heading sudden sympathies and antipathies without conscious motives, elective affinities, and the spontaneous and entirely natural tendency in some people to command and in others to obey. In short, this group consists of instincts in the precise sense used in animal psychology, and they are numerous in human beings. This is too often forgotten because they are overshadowed by the development of higher faculties, more complex and adapted to multiple ends.

The second form is purely unconscious. Whether the word is taken as synonymous with physiological or with a minimum of consciousness matters little: that is a question of ultimate origins, of philosophy rather than psychology. These causes belong to the category of slow-acting processes. It cannot be denied that daily events leave fleeting, ephemeral impressions in us that do not remain in consciousness and yet persist beneath it, arousing to some degree desires and aversions too weak to manifest themselves outwardly, but that become organized through repetition. These are small facts of experience engraved in our organic memory, where they seem buried forever, like so many other memories that chance revives to our great astonishment: scattered impressions of things seen or heard. These residues, similar or not, but all relating to one person or the same object, act when conditions are favorable; dispositions become acts. This is the deeply buried, unknown foundation on which a nascent passion finds firm support. No one will deny the influence of internal sensations in predisposing us to a passion for food, wine, or love, or of perpetual contact with money, in a banker or merchant, in predisposing someone to gambling or theft.

These slow, subterranean processes are equally important to the birth and the extinction of the passions. Novelists have often described the change that becomes apparent in us after an absence. In the presence of people or things, we feel different; a conversion has taken place without our knowledge. What was once beautiful seems ugly; what was desirable, repellent. Sometimes what touched us to the depths of the heart is now merely a vision or representation, dry, cold, and indifferent, from which all affective sensibility has withdrawn. We shall return to this point in a later chapter.

Nevertheless, taken as a whole, these subconscious or unconscious influences add nothing new to the account of the internal causes of the passions' origin. Reducible to instincts or internal sensations, whose role is crucial, or to unconscious cerebration, they are only one part, the most obscure and deepest part, of individual character.

Let us now consider passion fully formed, and try to determine its particular nature and distinctive characteristics. I recall in passing that every passion comprises three groups of phenomena: motor states (desires, aversions), intellectual states (sensations, images, ideas), and affective states, pleasant, painful, or mixed, simple or complex. This is universally accepted; but since these characteristics are common to every manifestation of the life of feeling, we must look elsewhere for what belongs to passion alone.

Its characteristics seem to me reducible to three, in order of importance: the fixed idea, duration, and intensity.

1. The first characteristic, essential and fundamental, is the presence of a fixed or at least predominant idea, continually at work. In a person governed by passion, it plays the same role as the ideal conception of the artist, of any inventor, or of the conscientious person in moral life.

Contemporary psychopathologists have studied fixed ideas and obsessions extensively. From their numerous works I take only the findings relevant to our subject, referring the reader to the specialist literature for the rest.

A normal fixed idea, they say, cannot be equated with an obsessive idea.

The former is willed, sometimes sought, and in any case accepted; it does not destroy the unity of the self. It does not impose itself inescapably upon consciousness. The individual knows its value, knows where it leads, and adapts conduct to its demands.

The latter is parasitic, automatic, irresistible. It is accompanied, moreover, by physical symptoms (anxiety, motor and vasomotor disturbances, and so on), and the self of the person afflicted, taken over by the fixed idea, cannot struggle against its pull.

Despite this comparison, we must admit that the criterion for distinguishing the two is very vague. An artistic, scientific, or mechanical conception may sometimes impose itself on the mind so tenaciously that a person becomes its prey, no longer able to direct it, guide it, or regain control of it. In fact, from a strictly psychological, inward standpoint, we cannot discover a definite difference between the normal and the pathological case, because the mental mechanism is fundamentally the same in both. The criterion must be sought elsewhere. We must leave the subjective realm and proceed objectively, judging the fixed idea by its effects rather than in itself. Applied to the passions, this criterion reveals a continuous series, beginning with the merely dominant idea and ending with the delusional idea, which is clearly pathological.

Another question that has also provoked lively debate concerns the nature of the fixed or obsessive idea. It is a complex state, made up of intellectual elements and affective-motor elements. Which of these two factors is essential and predominant?

The intellectualist theory replies: the primary factor is the idea, independent of any affective influence. If disturbances of feeling occur, they are always incidental and secondary; they result from the coercion exerted by the fixed idea and from the individual’s reaction against it. This is the position, under various names and in various forms, of Westphal, Meynert, Buccola, Tamburini, Morselli, Hack-Tuke, Magnan, and others.

The emotional theory replies: the fixed or obsessive idea is the logical outcome of an affective disposition, normal or pathological, which is always the initial fact, the cause of which the fixed idea is the effect. Its origin lies in the life of feeling and in the physical disturbances that accompany it, such as anxiety. At present, this seems to be the majority view (Pitres and Régis, Féré, Séglas, Freud, P. Janet, and others).

Whichever view we adopt, it is clear that, in passion, the fixed idea derives its force and efficacy only from the accompanying affective and motor states, and that these make up the greater part of the phenomenon as a whole. Yet the question of origin is merely pushed back, not resolved: does the intellectual element arouse and sustain the affective-motor state, or is the reverse true? The second hypothesis seems to me more plausible and more frequently borne out; but I admit that it is impossible to prove it. There is no doubt that both cases occur in life.⁹

This fixed idea, acting as a goal or an end and continually urging us on, may come from outside, suggested by an external event, as in love; or from within, through the transformation of a vague aspiration into a clear conception, as in the ambitious person. Every passion is therefore the specialization of a tendency toward attraction or repulsion that takes concrete form in an idea and thereby becomes fully conscious of itself. The individual is thus divided into two parts: the passion and everything else. We know how widely the proportions of these two parts can vary. In naïve and uncultivated minds, this tyranny of the fixed idea finds expression in belief in a spell, in magical influences, and so on.

In short, the fixed idea is the sign, if not the cause, of an increase in energy, but with that energy diverted in an exclusive direction. It acts as a motor or inhibitory power. This increase in energy and this diversion, resulting from external causes and above all from the internal disposition we have compared to a diathesis, are localized. There can be no doubt that the quantity of nervous energy, whatever view one takes of its nature, varies from one individual to another. Nor can there be any doubt that, at a given moment in any individual, the available quantity can be distributed in different ways. Nervous energy is not expended in the same way by a mathematician engaged in speculation and by someone satisfying a physical passion. One form of expenditure prevents the other, since the capital currently available cannot be used for two purposes at once. The psychophysiological state called passion perpetuates itself only at the expense of normal functions; it feeds on their impoverishment.

2. The second characteristic is duration. It cannot be specified: an entire life, years, a few months. However vague this criterion may seem, it is always sufficient to distinguish passion from mere emotion, which is a transient and unstable manifestation. By comparison, even the shortest passion is very long. Every passion is therefore stable to varying degrees, because the diversion of energy toward a predominant tendency produces a permanent state that resists, at least in part, the law of perpetual change that constitutes the normal life of consciousness. Everything unrelated to that tendency remains in a twilight state; our personality stays apart from it and does not take possession of it.

We have already observed that unstable characters are not suited to experiencing true passions, and that psychological analysis must correct the popular opinion that confuses emotionally impulsive people with passionate people. This is why, in general, we find no passions in children, with one exception grounded in their nutritional needs, which are highly developed, stable, and demanding: gluttony. Apart from this there are a few sporadic cases, such as precocious love and hatred, or a passion for study or the mechanical arts. These cases are exceptional because passion, being an intellectualized form of affective life, presupposes a degree of intelligence children have not yet attained and requires, for its continuance, a certain stability of which they are scarcely capable.

3. The third characteristic is intensity. Unlike the other two, it is not always a clear distinguishing mark, and at first it does not seem necessarily inherent in every passion. This requires explanation. The expenditure of energy is obvious in dynamic passions, with their impetuous and unrestrained course, in which desire constantly asserts itself through acts and is never satisfied. The same does not hold for static passions, such as hatred, cold ambition, and avarice; yet the intensity of effort is often no less. It takes the form of inhibiting movements; the energy remains in a state of tension. Thus many authors define passion by its force, although force is only one of its constituent elements.¹⁰

A problem now arises analogous to that concerning children: are savage peoples, living outside all contact with the civilized, capable of true passions? The question may be surprising, since it is generally assumed that the irresistible impetuosity of their desires and aversions is their predominant characteristic, from which the rule of the passions is inferred. This is still the same unjustified confusion between impulsive and passionate people. It would be paradoxical to maintain that savages do not feel certain simple and primitive passions, such as vengeance, an acute form of hatred, love, greed, or the attraction of gambling.¹¹ Yet, although intense, these passions are relatively rare and short-lived. Fundamentally they are mixed, hybrid states, transitional forms between impulsive emotion and passion: the intellectual conditions needed to ensure stability are lacking. A succession of acute, sudden, violent surges takes the place of a disposition that could become a passion if it could become chronic. Passion remains enclosed in an emotional matrix, unable to acquire its own characteristics. Needless to add, these hybrid forms are frequent among civilized people. They have contributed greatly to preventing or obscuring a clear distinction between the manifestations of impulse and those of passion.

Having completed our enumeration of the distinctive characteristics, let us return to the fixed idea and follow it at work. It constitutes passion through the close cooperation of association and dissociation, creative imagination, and the logical faculties at its command. After what has been said, there is scarcely any need to repeat that this work is fundamentally the work of the attractive or repulsive tendency, the primary cause of every passion, which sustains the fixed idea. The idea is the conscious goal and the light; nothing more. It acts as a complex state, intellectual and affective, that could just as well be called a fixed emotion.

I. Association and dissociation must be understood in their full sense, as applying to intellectual states, feelings, and movements.

The systematic association characteristic of passion is so well known and has been described so often that I shall merely recall it.¹² Every dominant idea is a center from which images appropriate to its nature proliferate. Its power of attraction acts not only on states of consciousness immediately related to the passion; by extension or transfer it reaches far beyond them, indirectly absorbing people and things into itself. It has been observed that feelings of a depressing kind, such as sadness and tender emotion, slow the associative process and increase the time required for it to occur: this is the pattern of sentimental reverie. Does this claim apply to static passions, the others being excluded by their nature? The hypothesis is unlikely, since every passion requires an increase in potential and actual energy. At most, one may concede that the associations constituting them occur within narrower limits, and only through direct relations with the ruling idea. Their imaginative constructions are therefore more considered than exuberant.

The work of dissociation, though obvious, has attracted less notice. Every passion contains a power of elimination. Its appearance introduces a principle of inhibition, of imperious isolation of one state of consciousness from all the others, and of disintegration of earlier sequences. It needs ruins on which to build; like a living being, it draws from its environment only what can nourish it. Passion not only excludes from the field of consciousness everything foreign to it; it also eliminates from its object, whether loved, hated, or coveted, everything that contradicts the implicit assertion at its core: my goal is the supremely desirable thing.

Finally, around the ruling idea, this center of attraction and repulsion, the twofold process of association and elimination constructs a solid edifice, fortified against attack, which often collapses only with the individual.

II. This preliminary stage may suffice for very simple passions and for people with little imagination. But it is a mistake to suppose that association and dissociation alone explain the intellectual mechanism of the passions. They prepare the way for another function of the mind: imagination.

Much has been written about its influence, especially by moralists. All imaginative people, it is said, are passionate. Besides being vague, this assertion has the drawback of encouraging the belief that imagination is always the cause and passion the effect. Yet the reverse seems much more plausible in most cases, as will be shown below. In any event, the question is complex and must be divided if it is to be treated precisely.

The word “imagination” has several meanings and is itself liable to ambiguity. First there is the lower, reproductive form, the simple repetition of past experiences. Whether spontaneous or prompted, this mental process does not rise above the level of association and introduces no new element. Yet in its vivid forms, when representations possess the clarity and relief of perception and even approach hallucination, are they irrelevant to the origin of the passions? No, but only on condition that an affective element, to be discussed below, is present and effective. Taken as a whole, imagination in this unorganized form, even when intense, seems more closely related to the emotionally impulsive temperament. I believe theoretical and factual evidence could be given for this, but such a digression would take me beyond my subject.

Creative or constructive imagination, the organization of images, is a new element and a ferment introduced into the life of feeling. Composed of diverse elements converging toward a single end, as passion is, it is a principle of unity rather than dispersion, and in the passionate person it places itself at the service of the dominating idea.

Creative imagination is a general term that resolves into a fairly large number of varieties with only one feature in common: invention. There is no need to enumerate them;¹³ we can reduce them to two principal types:

Imagination that takes free flight, prevailing in literature, the fine arts, and, in ordinary life, in romantic fantasies.

Imagination subject to more or less strict determining conditions, which requires the continual intervention of reflection, reasoning, and calculation if it is to succeed: as in the sciences, the mechanical arts, commerce, politics, and military strategy.

At first sight one might be tempted to believe that the imagination of passionate people belongs entirely to the freely ranging form. This is not so. Dynamic passions are mostly related to the first type; static passions to the second. The relationship varies with the nature of the phenomena and is determined by it. There are also mixed forms that partake of both. In passionate people endowed with powerful intelligence, the two types coexist. Thus Taine shows that Napoleon “possessed constructive imagination to the highest degree,” not merely that of a great general and an ambitious man; he also “dreamed of making Paris the center of Europe, the residence of the Pope, with four million inhabitants, the subordinate kings each having their palaces there, and so on.” Let us also recall his passion for the poems attributed to Ossian.

The development of passion and that of imagination influence one another. This is obvious. But we may ask which is the cause and which the effect. Does the emergence of passion awaken imagination? Or does imaginative activity arouse passion? The answer varies from case to case. It would be pointless to insist on this and reopen a discussion that would repeat the one concerning the fixed idea. What matters more is to determine the distinctive character of imagination in truly, greatly passionate people. This does not seem to me to have been pointed out. It consists in this: their imagination is above all affective.

I do not wish, even in passing, to discuss the question of affective memory, which I have studied at length in Psychologie des sentiments, part I, chapter XI, or to answer the objections of those who deny it, probably because they do not possess it. I take it as established that it exists in many people, if not in everyone. This form of affective imagination is necessary to passionate people, as it is to emotionally impulsive people. Images of objective origin, whether visual, auditory, tactile, or motor, which are internal representations of the external world, are not merely intellectual states in them. They are accompanied by an affective state experienced in the past and revived in the present, which is the principal element of their total state of mind. Sensory images are only its condition, support, and vehicle in consciousness.¹⁴ For the lover who inwardly hears his beloved's voice, or the poet who hears the bells that enchanted his childhood, the revived feeling is almost everything; the inner representation is almost nothing. The miser of the classic type, who in imagination sees and handles the gold and banknotes locked in his safe, has not only visual and tactile representations but affective memories at the same time. Without them there is no passion. Real passions are constructed from images of this kind. Compare the same passion, such as love, in someone without imagination, someone of average imagination, someone with a powerful imagination that is chiefly intellectual and composed of sensory images, like V. Hugo, or someone whose imagination is chiefly a matter of feeling and rich in affective images, like J.-J. Rousseau. Without further commentary, the form of imagination peculiar to the truly passionate person will stand out clearly.

Affective memory must therefore be placed first among the materials passion uses to construct its ideal, modify it, and renew it. Because of its duration, passion lives not only in the present, as emotion does, but in the past and future. It feeds on revivals and memories that cannot be dry, wholly intellectual representations like those of an engineer constructing a bridge or a railway employee devising a train timetable. These states of consciousness must be affective, remembered or anticipated as such, with the distortions and transformations every image inevitably undergoes, and affective images more than others. Certainly an affective memory thus revived has no independent, isolated existence in consciousness. It is always attached to some intellectual state that accompanied it previously. In the nature of things, it cannot be otherwise, and opponents of a memory or imagination proper to feelings have seemed to derive an objection from this fact. They demand the impossible, the contradictory. Pure affective life, without any intellectual state to anchor it, is so vague and exceptional that it scarcely counts for reproductive imagination. Yet are there not cases in which a sensation or an image so fleeting that it lasts only a few thousandths of a second suddenly evokes feelings from our past so abundant and overflowing that the intellectual state is submerged and engulfed? The affective coefficient has reached its extreme value.

Imagination necessarily influences the development of passion. In imaginative people, even modestly so, an ideal of love, gain, power, vengeance, or something else takes shape, and the individual strives to pursue and realize it, with continual variations on the theme. But once the importance of the affective coefficient is understood, the fundamental difference becomes apparent between passion rooted in feeling and intellectual passion: passion of the heart and passion of the head, the deep and the superficial, the true and the false.

In intellectual people, the work of imagination creates an illusion, giving an appearance of solidity to an unrooted passion that is often only a phantom or an exercise in dilettantism.

In those for whom the affective element of representations is primary, imagination creates or sustains true passions that possess the whole person and do not accommodate that person's whims.

We finally arrive at a somewhat paradoxical conclusion: creative imagination in the ordinary sense, meaning the faculty of constructing an unreal world from sensory images, is better suited to producing artificial passions than real ones, and in this form its influence on the life of passion is weaker than is generally believed.

By contrast, when sensory images recede relatively and their affective coefficient grows stronger, imagination lies at the very foundation of passion. It is less an influence than an essential participant. And since complex states of consciousness act by virtue of their complexity, the energy of the tendency, the foundation of every passion, is increased by what the imaginative construction adds to it.

III. With logical operations we rise one degree higher. Here an antithesis presents itself: passion does not reason, according to general opinion; passion reasons, according to some psychologists. The two positions are not irreconcilable. To understand this, we must penetrate the complexity of the passionate state and show that it contains, on the one hand, an intrinsic, internal logical function, inherent in every passion, everywhere and always, belonging to the logic of feelings; and, on the other hand, extrinsic, additional logical operations belonging to rational logic and occurring in two forms: constructive reasoning and justificatory reasoning. We therefore have three operations of the mind to examine.

1. Every state of passion needs elements from which to form itself, maintain itself, and grow. As we have seen, these are supplied by association assisted by dissociation. Yet this is not an explanation, for the attraction or repulsion exerted by the predominant tendency and the fixed idea in which it is embodied is scarcely more than a metaphor. It expresses only the clear and perceptible part of the mechanism, without showing the mainspring that drives it and lies in the very depths of the person.^E1 There we must seek the origin of the logical structure that, to some degree, forms the intellectual framework of a passion.

Once a tendency has passed beyond the level of pure instinct to reach full consciousness of its goal, without which it is not a passion, an exclusive, one-sided attitude develops in the individual. By virtue of this attitude, all judgments assign value to people and things only insofar as they converge toward that goal and favor it; everything unrelated or opposed to it is judged to have no value. The logical operation underlying every passion, whether in formation or already established, is therefore the value judgment. Elsewhere, in Logique des sentiments, p. 32 and following, I have emphasized the nature of these judgments, which may also be called affective judgments. Unlike a purely rational judgment or concept, such a judgment contains two elements, one intellectual and the other emotional, whose relative degree and importance vary from case to case. Clearly, in the passionate person the emotional element predominates, and its value or lack of value derives from its agreement or disagreement with the goal of the passion.

This affective judgment acts on perceptions capable of arousing or increasing love, hatred, ambition, and the like; on sensory images capable of producing the same effect; and on those states of consciousness I have proposed to call “emotional abstracts.” These are images reduced to a few qualities or attributes of things that stand for the whole and are selected or eliminated for various reasons, but always reasons of affective origin: in other words, because they please or displease us. The action of this value judgment is therefore to strengthen the affective element in states of consciousness evoked by circumstances, and to draw into the same current those suited to the goal indicated by the fixed idea. This value judgment is the sole logical operation, very simple and elementary, that exists in all passions.

Can we go further and admit genuine reasoning, a more or less extended operation proceeding through intermediate steps and ending in a conclusion? Can we suppose that a sequence of positive and negative value judgments leads to the conclusion that a person should be loved or hated, a goal pursued or abandoned? This seems to occur in the preliminary stage of certain passions, during the period of trial and indecision. But when the passion emerges rapidly or is already formed, that is, in most cases, the hypothesis is very doubtful. The conclusion seems more a result of reflection applied to an already constituted passion than an element contributing to its formation. For in the logic of feelings, which proceeds in the reverse direction from rational logic, the conclusion, or end, is given in advance: it determines the value of the judgments instead of being determined by them.

Nevertheless, examples of genuine reasoning can be produced, as G. Dumas has done.¹⁵ I am speaking only of reasoning inherent in passion itself, intrinsic reasoning; the other kinds will be considered below. I am not sure that two cases he cites require the syllogism he supposes: a Frenchman falls in love with a young Englishwoman because she speaks French as children do; a woman gradually falls in love with a friend of her father because he vividly reminds her of him. In my view, a simple transfer of feeling through resemblance suffices to explain both passions. But the author gives more convincing examples: a woman jealous of a Spanish woman encounters her husband smoking a Spanish cigar and immediately abuses him in the street. Here reasoning is evident; there is a conclusion: it is a gift from the woman she believes to be her rival. Ordinarily these forms of reasoning, inductive or deductive, peculiar to passion, are incorrect, have no probative value, and have long been classified among fallacies.¹⁶ But in the psychology of feelings we must beware of the intellectualist illusion that consists in supposing reason in everything and everywhere. Certainly, with a little dexterity, the mechanism of a passion can be reduced to a series of deductions and inductions, and even transformed into syllogisms. This meets a subjective need to understand it, and we fail to notice that dressing it in this rational disguise alters and distorts it. As far as possible, passion must be studied objectively, as it is: foreign to reason by nature, rational by accident.

Let us pass from internal logic, the only necessary logic and the one passion cannot dispense with, to external logic, which is merely an apparatus for its improvement.

2. Constructive reasoning is clearly only an auxiliary. It belongs to the creative faculty, not to passion itself; it is imaginative reasoning, not passionate reasoning. Let us note in passing that it is inappropriate to speak of reasoning in general, since the logical operation differs according to the nature of the passions. It cannot be the same in the lover and the miser, the fanatic and the gambler. What all passions have in common, once they have passed beyond animality, is an imaginative construction, broad or narrow, rich or poor, stable or shifting, according to the nature of the mind. This construction, born of a desire or repulsion that it sustains in turn, requires logical support to varying degrees.

For simplicity, it seems consistent with experience to divide passionate people into two broad classes: the violent, and the reflective or calculating.

As examples of the first type, take the mad lover, fierce jealousy, the unrestrained gambler, the Corsican or Neapolitan thirsting for vengeance, or religious or political fanaticism. By their characteristics, these states approach instinct, from which they differ only in greater complexity and clear consciousness of the goal. They are impulses rather than passions, or better, impulsive moments, frequent crises in a permanent state of passion. By the nature of things, the logical element occupies very little space and can be used only intermittently.

There remains the other group: the lover who devises methods of furthering his passion, hatred that quietly weaves its plot, the ambitious person who draws up a plan and, like a skilled general, modifies it as circumstances require. Here rational reasoning enters the scene and sometimes plays a very important role. But let us be clear: reasoning is external to passion. It is at passion's command, in the service of the desire that is its essential element. It is an auxiliary factor, not an integral component, of the passionate state. It is a superstructure.

3. Still more external is justificatory reasoning, which, as we have shown elsewhere, is a partial manifestation of the instinct of self-preservation. Applied to a passion or to any belief whatever, it is an effort by the individual to maintain that state and defend it against every shock. It may be compared to a set of outlying forts that passion places around itself to ensure its security. Indeed, it is so accessory that the passionate person often disdains to use it, either toward himself or toward others.

Ultimately, we believe the preceding analysis justifies the assertion that the only logical operation proper to passion is this endlessly repeated value judgment, which affirms or denies, selects or eliminates, according to the invariable rule of the logic of feelings, governed by the principle of finality. Everything else is useful but additional. Rational logic undoubtedly retains a considerable share in many cases. Why should this be surprising, since of all the vigorous forms of affective life, passion is the most intellectualized? It owes its clear outlines, stability, and duration to elements beyond feeling; through them it surpasses the ephemeral manifestations of impulse and emotion. Yet for passion, the procedures of rational logic remain a means, a help, an instrument it uses without their becoming part of passion itself.

According to this analysis, passion viewed as a whole is therefore a firm bundle of cooperating forces: at its center, a tendency driven vigorously toward a fixed goal; drawing perceptions, images, and ideas into its vortex; adding the work of imagination to reality; and finally sustained by a logic both rational and extra-rational. This explains its irresistible power and the ensuing annihilation of the will.

Many authors have treated the relations between passion and will. They have described the period of struggle between the emerging passion and voluntary activity, which in its normal state chooses, changes, and modifies according to circumstances, and now encounters an unexpected obstacle. Then comes the end of the struggle: passion in a state of complete systematization, invincible, absorbing the whole individual; action through compulsion rather than consent; the total disappearance of voluntary power. There is no need to return to facts so familiar and so often described. But a few final remarks should be added on motor activity and its varying role according to the nature of the passions.

Although popular opinion, as expressed in language, seems to see in the passions only a state of suffering, pati, the subjugation of the individual by an external force, viewed from another aspect passion is, on the contrary, one of the most evident forms of our activity. Physiologically, it modifies centrifugal, efferent innervation and therefore circulation, vasomotor tone, respiration, and secretions: in short, the whole of organic life, as well as movements. Since passions do not remain immanent but come into action, motor manifestations flow directly from them and form an integral part of them. Yet motor activity is not identical in all passions, or, more precisely, in all passionate people. Two types can be distinguished: one of impulse, the other of inhibition.

The first type is that of the so-called dynamic passions, which, as we have seen, retain an affinity of nature with instincts, impulses, and emotions. Passion seems to leap from the depths of the individual, passes wholly into its instruments, takes hold of them, possesses them, and concentrates itself in them. Movements acquire a suddenness, violence, and energy that often defy all restraint. The person deploys every available power without reserve; the whole being passes into action, and even the weakest can accomplish prodigies. Its characteristics may be summarized thus: the motor element is strongest, the intellectual element weakest.

The second type is that of static passions, more closely related to reflection, which is inhibitory by nature. Here it is no longer force alone, but other qualities of action: finesse, skill, subtlety, a calculated combination of violence and patience, impetuosity and circumspection; the inhibition of movements, expressive gestures, and words. Its characteristics may be summarized thus: the intellectual element is strongest, the motor element weakest.

I say nothing of the intermediate forms, probably more frequent than the pure types. Nor do I give any concrete example, because passion, being individual, varies according to temperament and character. Thus love belongs by nature more to the first type, but sometimes takes the form of the second. Ambition properly belongs to the second type, but often approaches the first. My sole purpose was to recall that in all passions, even those outwardly calmest, there are always potential or actual motor elements, and that on this point the difference between the two types is less one of substance than of form.

Although several works have been published under the title Physiology of the Passions, we may assert that the subject remains almost untouched in the sense in which we understand it: strictly confined to that group of affective manifestations whose characteristics we attempted to establish in the preceding chapter. A general knowledge of the physiological conditions of affective life would, in fact, be insufficient. The Lange-James theory has been discussed to the point of exhaustion: some reject it entirely, others accept it in part. Yet even if this theory, the intellectualist hypothesis of the Herbartians, or any other less familiar theory were regarded as established and universally accepted, it would be only a first step toward our question. For we seek to know not the conditions common to all forms of feeling, but the specific and necessary conditions of each passion, its biological substratum.

A comparison with the physiology of intellectual phenomena, which is much further advanced, will clarify the problem. The anatomy and histology of the brain and of the sensory and motor nerves, though not exhaustively known, have been established in their broad outlines. The same holds for the functional activity of the brain and its associated structures. Yet we are not content with that. It is only a general determination of the material conditions of thinking activity, which must be completed by knowledge of the conditions peculiar to each particular case: perception, the image, and the higher operations of the mind. We know how thoroughly the physiology of sensation in its relations with psychology has been investigated, and continues to be investigated with persistence, for each sense: vision, hearing, touch, and so on. On this rests the physiology of images, much less clearly determined, although it draws assistance from pathological phenomena such as hallucination and the aphasias. If we rise to judgment, association, the concept, and reasoning, the specific determination of physiological conditions becomes increasingly vague and uncertain, although the study of languages and other analytic signs supplies some material points of support. In short, the conditions peculiar to each distinct form of intellectual activity have been sought and sometimes found.

For the physiology of feelings, I see nothing comparable to these detailed investigations. Even supposing that one of the theories mentioned above, whichever it might be, sufficed to explain in general the conditions of affective life in its ordinary, moderate forms, it would still need to be completed and made more precise with respect to two special groups: emotions and passions. For simplicity, I deliberately omit the group of emotionally impulsive or unbalanced people, which belongs more properly to pathology. It is true that the physiological conditions of the principal emotions, fear, anger, joy, and grief, have been carefully studied by Lange and others after him, and this constitutes a great advance. But I repeat that, for passions considered as particular phenomena distinct from emotions, little is known of the parts and functions of the organism that cooperate in the existence of each, except in the case of love. Observations and experiments on the mechanism of expression, physiognomy, and expressive movement are the only attempts made in this direction. Though fairly numerous, they have the disadvantage of being confined to outward manifestations and seldom penetrating the internal physiology.

Since passions, especially the most intellectual ones, are highly complex structures, groupings of often heterogeneous states, their anatomical and physiological conditions cannot be simple. In my view, at least two levels should be distinguished, corresponding respectively to the lower and higher elements of passion: the first to unconscious or subconscious influences, the second to clear states of consciousness. A few examples will make this clearer.

A general sensation of discomfort or suffering spread throughout the body results from insufficient nourishment of the organism: this is the physiological basis of hunger. It is accompanied by a particular sensation, ordinarily localized in the epigastrium and abdomen, sometimes more widely diffused. But hunger is in fact the expression of a state of the whole body; it is totius substantiae, of the entire substance. This internal sensation is the resultant of a multiplicity of partial sensations, vague, obscure, and ill-defined, arising from the various parts of the organism. For this need, which in its normal form is appetite and in its morbid form a delirium of hunger, to become a passion, to rise from the first level to the second, it must arouse and organize around a dominant, stable idea, the pleasure of eating affirmed as the supreme good, a group of mental states. The group is, moreover, very limited, being reduced to visual, gustatory, and olfactory sensations or representations. However meager this psychology may be, it necessarily presupposes a corresponding physiology, sufficiently known in its general features and even in its cerebral localization.

The same account can be repeated for the drinker's passion. It too has its general and its particular physiology. Thirst expresses a state of the entire organism produced by a loss of the fluids necessary to life. It is a call for urgent replenishment. It too is totius substantiae, although it seems to be localized chiefly in the mouth and pharynx. Onto this physical need is grafted a passion whose psychology is still poorer and more limited than that of the preceding one, although its ruling idea seems more obsessive. The physiological conditions of this second phase, the passage from subconscious need to stable and repeated desire accompanied by full consciousness, are imperfectly known.

The passion of love occupies a privileged position. On the one hand, it has the physiological foundations of the animal, nutritive passions; on the other, it can sometimes stand beside the highest and most intellectualized passions. Since the processes of fertilization are a form of the processes of nutrition, sexual need is analogous to nutritional need. From this some authors conclude that the physiology corresponding to the unconscious or subconscious elements of sexual love repeats the general conditions described above for the nutritive passions. They maintain that, like hunger and thirst, sexual need originates in our whole organism, that it too is totius substantiae, and that we may say without metaphor “that we love with our whole body.”¹ The physiology of this first stage has been amply described in specialized treatises: conduction in the spinal cord and brain without specialized nerve fibers, and a presumed localization in the region of general sensibility, the central Rolandic convolution, the bases of the three frontal convolutions, and the superior and inferior parietal lobules. But the distinctive feature of the second stage is that the physiology of love can follow an ascending course, an evolution of ever-increasing complexity. At the lower end, the lover scarcely rises above the drunkard or the glutton; at the higher end, he can attain a subtle and refined intellectualism. Then appear the many operations enumerated above, association, dissociation, value judgments, reasoning, and the rest, all of which presuppose a physiological equivalent and together form a particular physiological grouping. Yet once we go beyond this general assertion, precise indications are entirely lacking.

If we pass from these three passions, closely connected with nutritive and organic life, to others that move away from it, or at least are not so deeply rooted in it, the physiological problem becomes more perplexing and scarcely illuminated at all.

Nevertheless, we may set apart certain passions that, however different in course and aim, seem to me to arise from a fundamental tendency: the individual's tendency toward expansion and the affirmation of personality, which may be summed up in Nietzsche's formula, the will to power. It underlies every passion that loves risk and adventure for their own pleasure; in a more intellectual form, it appears in the ardent pursuit of power or money, and in certain less frequent passions to be mentioned below. The physiological basis of this group of passions is the spontaneous need for activity, the irresistible urge to expend accumulated energy. Unsatisfied, it expresses itself in general restlessness and nervous excitement that only exercise can calm. This disposition, brought out by contrast with apathy, whether innate or acquired through illness or old age, has been described by physiologists under various names.² It acts sometimes in a more physical form, as in a passion for hunting or sports, sometimes in a more intellectual one. In my view, all forms of fanaticism also flow from this source, although they are fairly complex manifestations of passion. Beaunis makes an analogous observation: “It is this need for mental activity, when carried very far, that makes collectors, researchers, inventors, promoters of business ventures, speculators, planners, missionaries or apostles of a religion or an idea, writers, artists, financiers, and politicians, whose lives are a perpetual fever and whose brains are always seething” (work cited, p. 20). We shall return to this question later.

Very different are the static passions, of which avarice is the type. We may also note concentrated hatred that does not culminate in revenge, certain forms of jealousy, and so on. What organic basis can be assigned to avarice? Through its lack of sympathy, narrow egoism, and placidity, it stands in complete opposition to the preceding group and seems to consist chiefly of inhibitory actions. The state of tension produced by the fixed idea resembles a mental tetanus. Despite its narrow range and impoverished imagination, avarice is a highly intellectualist passion, and its physiology would be chiefly that of intellectual operations. Moreover, it offers little purchase for investigations in this direction. Perhaps the only possible approach would be through the study of character and, ultimately, temperament.³

In short, if we set aside the organic elements that underlie all passions and to which biology has devoted serious attention, there remain the intellectual elements, whose physiological conditions are very inadequately established. On one side are the most general ones, such as association, dissociation, and logical operations. On the other is the fixed idea, ruling or merely dominant, which is crucial to the origin and maintenance of passion. As we have said, it has prompted many studies, but almost exclusively pathological ones. Yet we must not forget that the absorbing fixed idea also occurs in inventors and researchers, and to a lesser degree in the preoccupations of ordinary life, and that these cases themselves differ from that of the passionate person.

We may therefore say with Renda: “There is no anatomy and physiology of the passions. Observations made thus far also concern the emotional processes with which they were confused. We do not doubt that the alteration of personality through passion rests on a series of physiological and perhaps even anatomical phenomena possessing their own characteristics. But just as the physiological characteristics of the mental disorders called functional diseases escaped us, although at present we are beginning to suspect some of them, so those of the passions escape us. Their mental complexity suggests a corresponding complexity of anatomical and physiological alterations.”⁴

This has been a lengthy discussion merely to establish something that is lacking. It will be excused if we recognize that solid knowledge of the biological factors would be no small aid to understanding the inner nature of the passions. Perhaps the gap is explained by the fact that, since physiological psychology took shape, the passions have been entirely omitted, forgotten as distinct manifestations, and left undefined in their characteristics. The subject could therefore scarcely attract physiologists' attention.

I should now like to attempt, not a classification, an almost impossible undertaking, as will be explained at the end of this chapter, but a genealogy of the passions. As a secondary or even tertiary formation, every passion should in principle be reducible to an elementary state, a tendency of which, according to the classical definition, it is merely the exaggeration. The only reasonable attempt is therefore, first, to determine the original source of each passion, and second, to show by what processes passions form: by an aggregation of homogeneous elements, of heterogeneous elements, or of elements that are both heterogeneous and opposed. All three modes of combination occur.

Our task would be greatly simplified if we could take as our starting point a well-established classification of primitive human tendencies: needs, appetites, and inclinations. We have seen that these tendencies or instincts are the functional expression of the physical and mental constitution: human beings possess them because they are human. Their origin may be sought, and has been sought, in their usefulness to life, adaptation, and heredity. But the psychologist need not raise that question and may be content to accept the facts.

Up to this point everyone agrees. But when it comes to determining these primitive tendencies precisely, some confine themselves to a simple enumeration, complete or incomplete, like W. James in Psychology, volume II, p. 383 and following; others resort to more rigorous procedures, like Paulhan in Les caractères, p. 116 and following. In the end, no classification has established itself as adequate and irreducible. The essential point is to recall once more that passion originates in movement or the inhibition of movement. A tendency is the possibility, becoming a reality, of acting in a particular direction and toward a determined goal. The internal and external sensations that prompt it to pass from potentiality into action are merely occasional causes. The fundamental phenomenon is and remains motor: appetition, tension, attraction, or repulsion.

If we take instinct in its particular, restricted sense, designating familiar forms of activity that attain their fullest development in certain animal species, it cannot be denied that its resemblance to strong passions is so striking that ordinary observation has registered it in language: the instinct of love, the gambling instinct, and so on. Without embarking on a digression, quite out of place here, on the nature of animal instincts, I shall observe that, apart from theological, metaphysical, or transcendental hypotheses, explanations have been sought along two lines: knowledge and movement. F. Cuvier and others after him held that animals “have in their sensorium innate and constant images or sensations that determine their actions just as ordinary sensations commonly determine action. It is a kind of dream, a vision that always pursues them.” Here the mechanism is explained through knowledge. Later, the distinctive character of instinct was placed elsewhere: it is the innate motor reaction to an external or internal stimulus. Three elements combine to form it: sensations, perceptions, or images, which are the occasional cause; movements connected with the organism's constitution; and the relationship between representations and movements. What is innate is this relationship, dependent on anatomical and physiological conditions. Here the mechanism is explained through motor adaptations.⁵

In every great passion there is a clear and single goal that draws the individual's entire activity toward it with irresistible force. Now, if the bee building its cell were conscious, as perhaps it is, of the goal it pursues and of the impossibility of escaping it, its state would closely resemble that of the passionate person, except for the absence of an affective accompaniment. In both cases there is a mechanical compulsion, as inexorable as the action of interlocking gears. Great passion therefore resembles an instinct. It is an acquired and temporary automatism; as long as it lasts, it reacts with unshakable constancy.

But not all our tendencies produce great passions; they lack the necessary substance. Many produce only little passions; a few are entirely unfruitful. If a complete list had been drawn up, we could be precise and indicate the exceptions. They would be rare, except among purely organic tendencies. Yet it seems doubtful to me that defensive tendencies, the instinct of modesty for example, produce passions in the strict sense. This question will be taken up again below.

In any event, this negative determination is not what matters. In the absence of an undisputed classification, we shall adopt a division that makes no scientific claim but suits our subject and is convenient for genealogical inquiry. It is as follows:

1. Tendencies whose aim is individual preservation.

2. Tendencies serving the preservation of the species.

3. Tendencies that contribute to the individual's expansion and the affirmation of the will to power.

These three groups produce the most frequent and widespread passions, and therefore those corresponding to the deep and stable needs of human nature.

4. In a final group I place the needs that are rarer and less insistent in most people, and consequently less apt to become predominant or tyrannical. The passions arising from them stand as individual varieties, aesthetic, scientific, religious, political, and moral passion, in contrast to the passions of a universal character manifested by humanity in every time and place.

An outline of this chapter is necessary here. The reader will not find a monograph on each passion, a task that would require several volumes; love would demand a volume of its own. We shall confine ourselves to genealogical inquiry and observations on the manner in which each passion is composed. Nevertheless, since earlier psychologists chiefly studied the most common passions, and contemporary psychologists have generally refrained from the subject, it seems necessary to dwell on the passions of the fourth group, too often forgotten or mentioned only in passing. The space devoted to each passion will therefore correspond not to its importance, but to the scarcity of studies on it. Although this procedure is open to criticism, it seemed preferable, if only to encourage others to undertake complete monographs.

I. Although the needs connected with the individual's physical preservation are numerous, including nutrition, respiration, locomotion, vocalization, and the natural tendency of each sense to exercise its function, we have seen that this group produces only two passions, arising from hunger and thirst, unless one is prepared to admit a passion for odors and perfumes.

These two passions, gluttony and drunkenness, have a simple and homogeneous composition. They include no disparate element at odds with the pleasure sought. We noted above the poverty of their psychology without sufficiently indicating its causes. There are two principal ones: the limited scope of their imaginative construction and their narrowly individualistic character.

Without imagination there is no passion. An organic need, breathing, is often accompanied by intense pleasure when we leave a confined place or fill our lungs with mountain air. Nevertheless, it does not become a passion because it does not contain enough mental elements, sensations and images, to form a coherent, stable whole that imposes itself on consciousness and endures there. The fundamental conditions of passion are consequently absent. Let me recall that the mental material of gluttony and drunkenness is fairly scanty, since it is reduced to a group of affective sensations or representations, gustatory and secondarily visual. Yet it must be acknowledged that over the ages they have undergone an evolution, from the voracity of savages to the orgies of Rome, the great feasts of the Middle Ages, and the refinements of the eighteenth century. Under the influence of civilization they have, as a whole, taken on a more intellectual appearance, but, like every passion, without losing their insistent, even obsessive character, embodied in a fixed idea. Descuret, who on the basis of experience does not hesitate to affirm “that there are people born gluttons just as others are born blind,” has given detailed accounts of the progressive and total invasion of the mind by culinary passion and of refinements of every kind resulting from prolonged reflection and practical trials.⁶

The narrow individualism peculiar to these two passions occurs in no other, with the possible exception of avarice. They exist only within the individual, enclosed there, without any power of communicative expansion or outward radiation through attraction or repulsion. For Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island, I can see many possible emotions; the only possible passions I can see are these. Communal feasts, invented in the remotest antiquity, might be invoked as a qualification. But this is the pursuit of another pleasure, foreign and external to the passion.

So far our two organic passions have been studied together. They must be separated when we consider the chronological order of their appearance. Gluttony is very early; the passion for intoxication is not. Moreover, a point that might escape a thoughtless observer, the latter is capable of a much more complex development that greatly enlarges its psychology: this occurs when it becomes a source of consolation or inspiration. It then undergoes a transformation. This organic passion, usually composed only of imperious sensations, changes into the pursuit of a life of imagination and dreams. Wine, spirits, ether, morphine, opium, hashish, and the rest, besides their own attraction, satisfy a stable and intense desire: easy access to a world of the unforeseen and unknown. Thus this passion, despite its origins, leads to the threshold of aesthetic passion.

Having renounced all monographic treatment, I pass rapidly and without comment over this transformation to return to our starting point: gluttony as a primitive passion. The fact is undisputed and a matter of common observation in children, as it is among savage peoples. We are therefore led to ask whether this is not a particular case of the law of “recapitulation” accepted by biologists and sometimes applied to psychology: “Ontogeny is the repetition of phylogeny; the development of the individual repeats, in abbreviated form, that of the species.” Might this predominance of nutritive passions at the beginning of individual life and the life of the species be the first stage of an evolution whose course it would be interesting to follow, noting the chronological order in which each passion appears? This question, raised here in connection with a particular case, is too complex and general to be treated now. Having merely indicated it, we would do better to postpone it to the Conclusion of this work, where it will be more appropriately placed.

II. Of all the passions, love has by far the most abundant literature, a compelling reason to be very brief. Moreover, according to our plan, only two points require treatment: its genealogy and its composition as a psychological whole.

1. Nothing is easier to establish than its origin: an instinct existing throughout the animal series. Some biologists have gone even further and, undeterred by the complete absence of a nervous system, have not hesitated to attribute this instinct to animal and plant microorganisms. They maintain “that the spermatic element, in moving toward the ovum it is to fertilize, is animated by the same sexual instinct that directs the complete being toward its female.” Others, it is true, reject this psychology as anthropomorphism and maintain that chemical actions suffice to explain everything.⁷ Be that as it may, whether purely mechanical, subconscious, or conscious, this powerful attraction of one individual toward another is the physical foundation on which passion will later be built. Passion has not yet arisen, for the sexual instinct alone, in its simplicity, differs greatly from the complex construction that constitutes amorous passion in the exact sense. Love is, in fact, a manifestation of affective life with a complete evolution, in which three principal periods can be distinguished: instinctive, emotional, and intellectualized. Passion is compatible only with the last two forms, especially the second, which corresponds to the complete type of love. For in the third period, that of pure, Platonic, or mystical love, the balance is disturbed at the expense of the physiological elements and instinct, which gradually recede before an increasingly intellectualized ideal.

2. It is at this moment, intermediate between the domination of instinct and that of the idea, that we encounter the principal forms of combination constituting love.

First there is the form rightly regarded as the complete ideal, composed entirely of homogeneous elements. In a well-known passage, Herbert Spencer, after observing “that we ordinarily speak of passion, the passion uniting the sexes, as a simple feeling, whereas in reality it is the most compound, and therefore the most powerful, of all,” attempts an enumeration of these elements, which I summarize: the purely physical state; the impression produced by beauty or charm; tender affection, which can exist apart from love; sympathy; admiration implying a certain respect; self-love gratified by being chosen and preferred; the pleasure of mutual possession; and freedom of action, because in love we are granted free use of another's individuality. “And since each of these feelings is itself highly complex, bringing together a great number of states of consciousness, we may say that this passion fuses into one immense aggregate almost all the elementary excitations of which we are capable, and that its irresistible power results from this.”⁸

Thus the normal form is a synthesis of homogeneous tendencies, directed toward attraction and accompanied by pleasant states, which gives it unity and stability. All other forms differ from it. The most common is jealous love, a heterogeneous and contradictory compound. It would be wrong to maintain that this is merely a matter of two coexisting passions, for love and jealousy are closely entangled and implicated in one another. Even when jealousy breaks out only in fits, and is therefore closer to emotion than to passion, it replaces the coherence of normal love with a perpetual threat of dissolution. Since jealousy, as will be explained below, is a combination of disparate and divergent states, composed of attraction and repulsion, conflict is inevitable among so many discordant elements that affirm and deny, attract and repel. Such a passion, sustained only by the fixed idea, the beloved object, is therefore stability amid a storm.

Less frequent, but much simpler in composition, is love accompanied by contempt, or, to a lesser degree, by lack of esteem. This form of passion has the distinctive feature that it cannot be explained by mental elements alone; it also involves a moral element. For contempt is not a judgment of fact but a value judgment, like all moral judgments. Although contempt is an attitude of mind everyone knows from experience, its nature becomes clearer when it is compared with a coarser, more definite state: physical disgust, which is fundamentally a defensive tendency of the organism, a protective instinct, and ultimately a form of the instinct of personal preservation. Contempt is its intellectualized form; it stands to organic disgust as conscious fear stands to organic fear. At its simplest level, contempt in love consists in withdrawing from the object of passion, which, when perceived or represented, evokes a painful feeling. It is a defensive position that seems reducible to inhibition. At a higher level, disgust or contempt, at first more passive, is accompanied by a more active feeling of irritation. There is a passage from a defensive to an offensive attitude: this is the beginning of a disposition that, as it grows, will become hatred. Mantegazza has shown in detail the passage from simple repugnance to disgust and hatred in facial expression and in the bearing of the whole body as it repels or threatens.⁹

For the moment, let us remain with this unstable position, nevertheless enduring in some people, in which love and contempt coexist. The causes of this heterogeneous and apparently contradictory combination are easy to determine: the instinct of preserving the species sustains love, while the instinct of individual preservation sustains contempt. Physical and moral nature coexist in discord. Whatever one may think of the “genius of the species” and of Schopenhauer's metaphysics of love, it expresses a positive fact: the action of an inexorable natural force. On the other hand, the individual, no longer as an infinitesimal fragment of the species but as a conscious personality, understands the diminution, the loss of worth inflicted by this love because the choice was a bad one, and tries to resist.

A still more acutely contradictory form is the mixture of love and hatred so often depicted by novelists and dramatists. It differs from jealous love because jealousy involves the true or false belief that one has been dispossessed in favor of another; it presupposes three factors. The case of hatred is simpler, being confined to the two lovers. At first sight, this monstrous combination is bewildering and seems inexplicable. The obscurity clears if we observe that love in the restricted sense, the attraction of one sex toward the other, is entirely distinct from sympathy, tenderness, and their derivatives. Common opinion wrongly identifies them, and many philosophers have shared the error, maintaining that the sexual tendency is the origin of altruistic feelings. In fact, sexual love is fundamentally egoistic; proof could easily be given.¹⁰ In fact, too, it is most often combined with the attractive feelings enumerated by Spencer, but the combination is not indissoluble. An analogous association exists between religious and moral feeling. It is neither original, as history proves, nor essential; it is often absent, to the dismay of common opinion, which does not understand this dissociation.

Once this is established, the question becomes clearer. In love, besides the sexual instinct, a characteristic of the species, there is individual character, egoistic in some people, affectionate and expansive in others. Let us leave aside the latter, who constitute the normal type. Love and hatred can coexist only in those in whom two egoisms are added together. Their very weak sympathetic tendencies are easily checked or annihilated by the destructive tendency underlying hatred. In other words, the initial movement proceeds from the sexual instinct and, through a natural physiological radiation, arouses sympathetic tendencies in the normal person, but malevolent or destructive tendencies in the egoistic or unbalanced person.

Yet this division between the two categories of lovers does not fully answer the question: how can one pass abruptly from love to hatred without tangible reasons? And yet how many such cases there are. Recall the tragic relationship of Alfred de Musset and George Sand, “who love one another madly and hate one another furiously, who part with cries of rage and return to one another in outbursts of tenderness only to torture one another again, who emerge from this duel of love like combatants battered by blows, weeping, crying out, their hearts broken. ... The life these two lovers led together was so painful that after the break George Sand wrote to Sainte-Beuve that she would rather blow her brains out than begin the same life again.”¹¹ How many unknown people have passed through storms like those of these celebrated writers. “In several criminal cases,” Proal says, “I have found that a lover killed or attempted to kill his mistress a few moments after having intimate relations with her. The most violent loves are followed by the most ferocious hatreds.”¹²

In my view, the answer to this psychological problem is this: the lovers, or at least one of them, are not truly passionate people but emotionally impulsive ones. Deep passion consists in stability under the unremitting pressure of an exclusive ideal. The passion of Musset and those like him in love consists in sudden needs, impetuous surges, and violent emotions. It is not passion as a chronic state, but its simulacrum, composed of successive acute states or crises: a return to the condition of emotional disposition. Certainly, amorous exhaustion could end in indifference or disgust, as ordinarily happens; but in unbalanced people the reaction goes to the extreme, hatred or death. The beloved object has changed its value, becoming negative instead of positive. It is probable that in these excessively excitable and impulsive beings an unconscious comparison takes place between what the object seemed in the past and what it seems in the present, producing an irritation that transforms it into an enemy.

This form of love is undoubtedly pathological. One may, if one wishes, recall the ferocity of the rut in certain animal species and invoke ancestral influences. It is less hypothetical to seek the immediate cause in defects of the individual's physical or mental constitution.

Had I not deliberately excluded the pathology of love from my subject, one could proceed further along this path and recall the intensification of sensual pleasure through bloodshed, whether in an isolated individual or in crowds, when murder and rape are mingled in revolutions and the sacking of cities.

We have indicated only the principal forms of the second stage in the evolution of love. Even leaving aside the third, intellectual stage, which would supply further varieties, such as Platonic love or love through vanity, how many homogeneous, heterogeneous, and contradictory elements are grouped in countless combinations. If we also take account of differences of sex, of what each lover contributes according to character, temperament, and culture, and of the whims of fashion, we shall understand how many different manifestations lie beneath the single term love, and why this passion is so important in the history of humanity.

III. So far we have seen a single tendency, organic or sexual, transform itself into passion. The study that follows is less simple. We pointed out above the individual's fundamental tendency to expand its being, its “will to power,” which unfolds sometimes in a physical and sometimes in a mental form. This seems to us the original source of very diverse passions. Let us note incidentally that people in whom these passions are absent are the nonpassionate, setting aside organic and sexual passions. Is this “will to power” merely a general formula summing up multiple tendencies, which alone are real? Or is it an innate, constitutional state that differentiates itself in the course of life and manifests itself through those multiple tendencies? Either view may be adopted; it matters little to our subject.

Let us compare the original tendency underlying every passion to a root with its stem, which sometimes remains single and produces only one passion, and sometimes branches and produces several. Around this stem crystallizations accumulate, aggregate, and consolidate: these are the states of consciousness, the constituent elements of every passion. On the branching stem, suppose that each branch crystallizes in its own way, differently from its neighbors. This gives us an image of passions very different in appearance despite their common origin, of which examples will be given below. They are members of the same family who have forgotten their common ancestor.

To draw up the genealogy of passions arising from this tendency toward expansion, we shall divide them into three categories, according to whether expansion occurs through sympathy, conquest, or destruction. I ask the reader not to be too exacting about this somewhat rough division, convenient though it is for our exposition.

Little need be said about the first group. Since it seldom goes beyond the range of moderate feelings, it produces few passions. When they do arise, their first origin lies in sympathy, whether this is regarded as a general property of sentient beings or as a tendency toward expansion in an assimilative form. Elsewhere, in Psychologie des sentiments, part II, chapter IV, I have indicated how the development of sympathy passes through several stages. At first organic, automatic, and unconscious, it is scarcely more than a property of living matter. It then becomes psychological, creating analogous affective dispositions in two or more individuals. If, during this period of psychological unison, one could read the minds of those who sympathize, one would perceive a single affective phenomenon reflected in several consciousnesses. Yet this state of sympathy does not by itself constitute a bond of affection or tenderness between those who experience it; it merely prepares the way. A new element must be added, an affective manifestation known as “tender emotion,” to use the term established by several authors, which expresses itself in benevolence, pity, friendship, and family feelings: in short, in affections that possess an altruistic character to some degree.

This group supplies a large share of those ordinary, everyday feelings of moderate intensity that we have distinguished from emotions and passions. Sudden surges, or emotions, and stable, tyrannical states, or passions, undoubtedly sometimes arise, as in the extreme forms of maternal love. But taken as a whole, this group deserves only a very brief mention in a study of the passions. By nature, tenderness and its derivatives resist excess and can reach it only by adulterating themselves.

The second group is of an entirely different importance. The expansive tendency takes on a conquering character and produces passions that appear very diverse.

Let us first mention the minor forms, to which we may return later in studying the small passions: bodily exercises, sports, hunting, and so on, which can acquire and retain the characteristics we have assigned to passion, absorbing the whole person.

On the same foundation arise other passions of greater scope, because their psychological constitution is much richer in intellectual elements: the taste for adventure and its forms, reducible to a single tendency, to dare, to risk, to expend overflowing energy in defiance of danger, through boldness and audacity. This complex passion gathers diverse states around the fundamental tendency: curiosity, attraction to the unknown, desire for novelty, expectation and hope, and the affirmation of strength by seeking obstacles to overcome and dangers to surmount. Among all peoples, at certain periods of their history, this passionate type has predominated. Such were the medieval knights who spent their lives in feats of arms and perpetual tournaments, ranging through every land in search of exploits and challenging all comers. The conquistadors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were of this nature, but with a more concrete ideal: to acquire gold and land. The passion for adventure was reinforced by ambition. We may also cite the great explorers of every age. Christopher Columbus is the type; his biography, known in the smallest details, is a perfect example of the invincible tenacity of a fixed idea governing an entire life.

In short, with its variations, this is the passion of exuberant natures and people of great activity. Naturally, therefore, it comes very close to the temperament of emotionally impulsive people and differs from it only in the stability of its goal. The passion for adventure is nourished by the unforeseen: it is a fabric of changes and emotions resting on a close, stable weave.¹³

Besides the preceding passions, the tendency to seek adventure and risk and to venture into the unknown also produces the passion for games of chance. It is remarkable that play, in the broad sense of a surplus of vital energy, disinterested and superfluous activity, or preparation for the exercise of a function, has been a favorite subject of contemporary psychology and even aesthetics. I need only recall Groos's two books on play in animals and human beings, so interesting and so richly documented. Gambling as a passion, by contrast, is almost forgotten. In recent years one can scarcely find more than a few brief and rare essays.¹⁴ Yet we are dealing with a passion inferior to none in antiquity, universality, violence, and tragic consequences.¹⁵ In truth, only inveterate gamblers could write this psychology with competence, but they have other concerns. Becoming a gambler out of curiosity involves an entirely different state of mind. Here is someone who, visiting Monte Carlo, gambles and tries to describe his feelings: when he wins, the illusion of being skillful and showing as much merit as in making an intelligent move at chess; when he loses, another illusion, for he criticizes himself for having chosen a particular number (see France, article cited). But this is not a passion. One cannot inoculate oneself with a love of gambling at will. What would we say of an unfeeling person who proposed, out of curiosity, to fall passionately in love, and of the results of the attempt?

To study this passion in its true nature, we must first eliminate its apparent forms, its simulacra:

Gambling from habit or to pass the time, accompanied by very moderate excitement and having a more sedative effect;

The gamblers called systematic: self-controlled, calculating, with gain as their sole aim. This is a profession that, like any other, is sometimes pursued with ardor and eagerness;

Gambling as a passion is a very different psychological combination. Let us try to determine its principal elements.

1. The desire for gain. It is strange that some authors have denied it, an error to be explained below. For how can the passion for gambling be understood unless its principal, though not its only, motive is the violent desire to acquire wealth effortlessly and at a single stroke? If doubt were possible, consider this passion among primitive peoples: the simplicity of their mental state allows its nature to show through. Its immediate aim is the easy and rapid acquisition of things possessing value as property or in exchange: weapons, livestock, slaves, and other wealth in kind, since money does not exist.

2. The tendency toward risk and adventure, which follows another path instead of expending itself in sports, military expeditions, or explorations. The fever of inveterate gamblers is well known. Marro observes “that gambling occupies the same place in the field of psychomotor activity as alcohol does in nourishment; it gives the illusion of wealth as wine gives the illusion of strength. Thus gambling mania occurs under the same conditions as dipsomania and erotomania.” As a result of this feverish state, a phenomenon occurs that is not rare in affective life. The irresistible need to try one's luck becomes predominant, while concern for gain recedes into the background. The passion for gambling therefore takes on a disinterested appearance, seeming to operate only for its own sake, for the sole pleasure of satisfying itself. In our view, this has suggested the error mentioned above, that the inveterate gambler is not moved by the lure of gain. In fact, however, gain is the ideal, conscious or not, that constantly sustains and stimulates the tendency toward risk. Without it, the tendency would be an empty activity without a distinctive character.

These are the two fundamental conditions on which this passion rests. Fundamentally homogeneous and convergent, they form a unity, although analysis can separate them because they do not necessarily coexist. Gambling is a hunt whose game is gold.

3. Since games of chance imply the hope of material or monetary profit, or simply the honor of triumph, there are the emotions of the struggle against present opponents or against that unknown thing, chance: the pleasure of victory, the pain of defeat followed by an impulse to recover one's losses, exaltations and depressions. All this constitutes the state of perpetual alertness called gambling fever. It is concentrated and intensified expectation, which also occurs in other passions. Let us note that it is only an attitude of mind, dynamic through the acute tension that characterizes it, and formal in the logician's sense, meaning that it is empty of all content in itself. Its ordinary substratum is an imaginative construction of the future, a group of representations projected forward and located beyond the present by a progressive movement, the reverse of what occurs in memory. This imaginative activity of expectation is sometimes very rich, as before a lovers' meeting. Here, by contrast, the content of expectation is very simple: gain or loss, victory or defeat. The individual's entire effort is, as in attention, limited and localized at a single point; and, as in attention, motor states predominate.

4. Finally, there is a mysterious element: an unconscious or unreasoning faith in the power of the unknown, of chance, of a Fate. Nothing is more familiar than gamblers' optimistic or pessimistic superstitions: premonitions, dreams, good and bad days, unlucky seats, unlucky neighbors, omens, encounters, and so on; some conceal amulets. This state of belief seems to me to rest on an unconscious postulate that may be formulated as follows: when, in a given case, one event among several possibilities occurs without any determinable cause, it is the effect of a higher power. Abundant factual evidence could be produced of this implicit belief in a mysterious power manifested through the lot, regarded as a judgment of God or a decree of Destiny.¹⁶ Certainly, most gamblers today do not hold this naive belief. Nor is it necessary to invoke atavism or ancestral influences; it is enough to take human nature as it ordinarily is. This is a case of the logic peculiar to belief, desire, and fear, which cannot withstand rational criticism for an instant but which the intensification of passion tends to strengthen.

In short, despite the few psychological studies it has prompted, gambling must be regarded as one of the typical forms of dynamic passion. In this respect it is inferior to no other, not even love.

Outwardly, the gambler belongs among the emotionally impulsive: through the violent, irresistible impulse interrupted by acute crises; through physiological expression, sometimes a deliberately impassive face masking inner agitation, sometimes contortions, palpitations, and rage that unconsciously drives the nails into living flesh; and through the frequency of suicides and crimes. Fundamentally, however, the gambler is a truly and greatly passionate person because of the obsessive idea that possesses the whole being and whose tenacity is almost invincible. A man from Hamburg, Kant says, who had lost a large fortune through gambling consoled himself by watching others play and thinking that if he recovered it, “he could put it to no more agreeable use than to begin again.” A political prisoner at Mont-Saint-Michel gambled away his meager ration of broth and wine despite being ill; he died of starvation (Descuret). How many others act in the same way.

Such is the strength of this passion that, as we have seen, it can undergo a Platonic transformation in which it becomes merely the attraction of risk and the unknown, something analogous to war, a challenge to destiny, with gold only a support and a lure. Thus it has rightly been said of gambling “that in every truly complete passion there is poetry, something indefinably tragic and almost grandiose.”

Thus, starting from a very general biological property, the natural tendency of the living and sentient being toward expansion, we have first seen it take a definite form: the impulse toward risk and adventure. Then it takes three directions, each corresponding to a different psychological combination. The first is poor in intellectual elements and limited in reach.^E1 The second is openly aggressive, in direct conflict with people and things, and makes itself felt in the world through its social influence. The third is no less violent but confined within the narrow circle of the individual and those close to that person.

But the tendency of excessive physical and mental activity toward expansion, the “will to power,” can also take other directions and pursue a precise, definite goal. Love of risk becomes only a subordinate means, or even disappears entirely. From this tendency arise two passions whose appearance and psychological composition, despite their common origin, are entirely dissimilar: ambition and avarice.

Ambition is a violent and continual desire to rise above others. In this definition, the two adjectives “violent” and “continual” are necessary, for the simple desire to rise is natural to most people. There are different categories of ambitious people, according to their goal, whether domination, honors, or fame, and according to their methods, whether impetuous, reflective, or mixed. A monograph on this passion belongs as much to the moralist as to the psychologist. Its broad outlines are so familiar that, unless it is studied in depth, one cannot escape commonplace observations. Its psychological elements are these: first, an absolute egoism, a hypertrophy of the self unequaled by any passion, even love, and caricatured in delusions of grandeur. Conquerors are the extreme case, although they try to persuade others, and sometimes themselves, that their ambition serves the general interest.¹⁷ Second, through the reflection and wealth of invention it requires, ambition would be the most intellectual of all passions if avarice did not exist. Third, great ambitions involve a tendency toward risk, but as an auxiliary procedure, a means, or for pleasure and curiosity. More modest ambition, calculated and persevering, excludes risk as far as it can.

Possession is another form of power. Property in all its forms is condensed force, energy in a potential state. Some expend it according to their needs or whims; others hoard it. Hence two varieties.

The person who works hard to acquire much and spend much, the American type, easily slides into extravagance. Is this a passion? No. It can be called one only by a misuse of language. It is the effect of temperament, character, and a disposition sometimes generous, sometimes vain. It is a habit, but not the tyranny of a dominating idea.

The other variety is avarice, the perfected type of passion in its static form.¹⁸ Its psychology is chiefly negative, apart from the fundamental tendency, which remains unshakable. Unlike the spendthrift, the miser lacks imagination and sympathy. Judgment is limited, intelligence narrowed and without horizons; there is a horror of risk and little effort. Only the will is tenacious, being one with the passion. The miser is master of himself and others; he knows neither impulses nor fancies. In short, he is happy, apart from occasional fits of fear.

Yet there is an idealist element in this passion, already noted by earlier psychologists, which it would be very regrettable to forget. “Leibniz,” writes Dugas, “observed that avarice bears witness to the incredible resources our imagination possesses for overcoming sensual and brutal passions and mastering the most imperious instincts. More simply, it is the typical example of a self-sufficient passion, like the ancient Sage, no longer enjoying or seeking satisfaction of any kind, content merely to be and subsist, and preserving intense vitality in a diminished life. This is what may be called feeling in the abstract state: simplified, subsisting apart from its necessary and normal manifestations.” “However paradoxical it may seem, the miser's love of money is disinterested. He attaches himself to property for its own sake, without any intention of making it serve his material well-being or moral improvement. This love of property in itself and for itself has a character at once material and mystical in the miser.

“Its material character appears in the miser's feeling of intense pleasure whenever he is in the presence of the currency representing wealth. He always prefers forms with intrinsic value, above all gold. Many love to contemplate, pile up, handle, and move gold coins. We have seen that the favorite pleasure of one of our subjects was to cover the entire surface of his table with them and remain there for long hours, absorbed in a kind of ecstasy.

“The mystical side of the miser's relation to his property is just as evident. The distinctive feature of mysticism is self-forgetfulness before the beloved object, or rather a kind of fusion manifested in a state of consciousness at once intense and exclusive, whose most complete realization is ecstasy. Now this state certainly exists in the miser in the presence of wealth, especially when symbolized by gold” (Fursac, article cited, p. 180).

That is why avarice has its heroes. There is no need to enumerate facts familiar to everyone. For the sake of this passion, the miser goes as far as death from starvation, cold, or refusal of care or remedies. “A woman of classic avarice said shortly before entering her death agony: I should like to melt down my whole fortune and swallow it before I die” (ibid., p. 169).

The third and final group of passions arises from the tendency toward expansion in an essentially, not accidentally, destructive form. Its starting point is a very general and somewhat vague disposition that, in contrast to the first group, of which it is the complete antithesis, may be called antipathy.

Since Adam Smith, sympathy has been studied in its many aspects by psychologists and physicians; I do not see that antipathy has aroused the same zeal. Yet it seems to me that, by applying the same method to its study, one could trace its evolution and mark stages of increasing complexity, as with sympathy.

The first stage is organic, at most subconscious. Examples include the antipathy of active, restless, quick-moving people toward inert, apathetic people who scarcely move; that of a frail, sickly being toward a strong, well-built individual; and, often, the spontaneous repulsion healthy and vigorous people feel toward the sick and their languor. All this scarcely rises above the level of physiology, apart from a vague consciousness of the repulsion.

The second stage is instinctive or intuitive antipathy, possessing a psychological character, but still undeveloped, without clear, that is, analytical, consciousness of the causes arousing it. Novelists have often described it: two strangers who feel at first sight that a rivalry in love, ambition, or something else must arise between them. It is the presentiment of possible, probable hostility.

The third stage is antipathy of character, sharply defined and fully conscious. For example, the antipathy of an expansive person toward an inwardly concentrated one; stronger still, that arising from differences of education, caste, class, religion, and so forth.

What is the physiological and psychological mechanism of this affective disposition? The mechanism of sympathy is simple, being reducible to a slow infiltration, a propagation of movements, or a sudden invasion, as a result of which the same affective state arises in two or more individuals. We said above that if, at this moment of psychological unison, one could read the minds of those who sympathize, one would perceive a single affective phenomenon reflected in several consciousnesses. In antipathy, by contrast, the psychological mechanism is much more complex. Far from being able to transmit feelings and tendencies to the other person, the person exerting the influence awakens resistance, a reaction due to the difference in affective nature: hence an irreducible antagonism. Herbart's psychology, as is known, rests entirely on the hypothesis of a conflict, a struggle between representations, states of consciousness treated as forces. It could serve to make cases of antipathy intelligible and provide a sufficient explanation of them.

Whatever the merits of this hypothesis, antipathy expresses a partial or total opposition of affective nature between two individuals, and when it has reached its third stage, it is ready to produce a passion: hatred. When one is, or believes oneself to be, injured, humiliated, despised, or persecuted, in reality or imagination, antipathy asserts itself with a definite object and justifying reasons. It attaches itself to a person, grows stronger through accumulation, and becomes stable and obsessive. It has acquired all the characteristics of passion.

We often hate those we have injured, even in a mere fit of anger, and even when we have good reason to suppose that the injured person has forgotten or forgiven. This psychological position is paradoxical and reverses the logical order, yet it can be explained. First, through sympathy in the etymological sense, or, if one prefers, through an imaginative construction, the offender feels within himself the state his attack must have produced outside him, in the offended person. He attributes it to that person and spontaneously puts himself in the other's place. Next, through a natural mechanism, this malevolent state gives rise within him to the antipathy that ought to exist outside him, so that he cannot escape the belief that it does in fact exist in the offended person. This is a fairly complex case of dynamics at once representational and affective.

Hatred is a homogeneous psychological combination, for it consists of static tendencies toward repulsion, a permanent state, and dynamic tendencies toward destruction, an intermittent state. These two states, the second only a degree of the first, are accompanied by a painful feeling and directed toward the same goal. In a synoptic table, Mantegazza, in the work cited, chapter XIII, enumerated the movements and modes of expression characteristic of hatred. Apart from phenomena of the sympathetic nervous system and vasomotor phenomena, he places them in two groups: first, elementary movements of withdrawal and repulsion; second, threats in potential and actual form. This corresponds exactly to the groups of states of consciousness indicated above.

Viewed from outside, this passion, which smolders for a long time and sometimes forever, is fairly monotonous, except for two events that dramatize it: fits of anger, which are crises, and revenge, which is an ending.

The anger of the hateful person is a temporary return to the acute, emotional form. It breaks out as circumstances dictate; accumulated energy is momentarily discharged. Some characters do not even experience these violent surges; their hatred is “cold,” meaning that the force held in tension never becomes active force, and the desire for revenge, always the conscious or unconscious goal of hatred, is never realized. Bain, in Emotions, part I, chapter IX, maintained that anger is a genus of which hatred is a species. This strange assertion can be explained only by the author's failure to follow the genealogical method. We shall, moreover, discuss it in detail in Chapter III in connection with a more general question: can an emotion produce a passion?

Revenge is the logical outcome of hatred. It is not a passion but the final moment of a passion, its conclusion, its end. It is to hatred what possession is to love: a satisfaction. It varies according to times, places, characters, and sexes; those details do not concern us here. In anger, revenge is immediate. In hatred, it is long prepared, premeditated, and calculated, and often comes about only after much hesitation.¹⁹ Like every impulse carried into effect, this final explosion is followed by a state of relaxation and contentment. The act of revenge has freed the person from the obsession, and hatred has died because it no longer has an object.

Should hatred be considered a genus of which jealousy is a species or variety? Or are they two passions of distinct types, independent in their origin? I incline toward the second hypothesis. But discussion of this problem seems undesirable, because in the shifting world of feeling and passion, the terms genus, species, and variety lose their scientific value and may be merely a delusion.

The distinctive character of jealousy is that it rests on the instinct or love of property, which is itself only an extension of self-love, a form of the tendency toward expansion. Lovers' jealousy supplies the finest examples: the person who rages at the thought that his mistress has been admired, or merely looked at, by another. The cause arousing jealousy is the true or false belief that one has been dispossessed or deprived of a coveted good.

A feeling of hatred then arises against the person responsible for the dispossession or deprivation. Dispossession is the worse case, because there is a real and continually felt diminution. The hatred thus produced is therefore not primary, but an effect of the situation, and it ceases if the fixed idea of theft disappears.

In short, jealousy is a passion composed of heterogeneous or divergent elements. There are: first, the representation of a good possessed or desired, an element of pleasure acting in the direction of attraction and excitement; second, the idea of dispossession, as in the betrayed lover, or deprivation, as in someone denied an expected inheritance, an element of grief acting in the direction of depression; third, the idea of the real or imaginary cause of this dispossession or deprivation, which arouses aggressive or destructive tendencies to varying degrees. In passive, inert forms of jealousy, this third element is very weak.

Jealousy is therefore more complex than hatred and, for that reason, more personal. It consequently does not attain the general, almost impersonal character found in hatred between peoples or between groups such as religious sects, political parties, and social classes.

Jealousy has its varieties. One is jealous through love, ambition, vanity, professional rivalry, and so on. In ordinary language, amorous jealousy is jealousy without qualification, jealousy par excellence, perhaps because it is the most frequent and certainly because it is the most dramatic. In any event, a psychological distinction must be made between it and the other forms. First, it develops in two directions: it targets both the person who betrays and the person who assists in the betrayal. It requires three actors: the dispossessor, the dispossessed, and the deserter. It consists of love and hatred and passes continually from one extreme to the other. It varies according to whether it arises from the senses, the heart, or the head, as in jealousy through wounded self-love or vanity. It differs in men and women.²⁰

The other forms of jealousy arise more from deprivation: the desired good has gone to someone else, a coveted position, an honorary distinction, a distinguished clientele, success in society, and so on. These cases come closer to pure and simple hatred. If they required a particular name, envy would be the most suitable.

A final question arises that none of the preceding passions has raised. We often speak of “jealousy” in animals and young children. This contradicts our thesis that passion is a secondary, late formation requiring the development of intelligence.

In the case of animals, many facts are classified under this heading in works of comparative psychology. Descuret also relates some rather curious ones. Apart from rivalries aroused by sexual love, domestic animals seem jealous of one another over food and caresses; they are sometimes irritated by the attention given to the children of the household. The same is true of children, between brothers and sisters, or toward children outside the family when a preference is shown for the latter in words or deeds. This feeling seems to appear very early, within the first year according to Perez.

It is very difficult for an adult to penetrate the true depths of these confused and undeveloped minds. Adults interpret appearances, such as sulking and anger, and judge according to their own mature nature. The explanation seems simpler to me: it is enough to admit antipathy in its initial stage, erupting in the presence of its object. But this is far from true passion, tenacious, obsessive, and conscious of itself; far from jealousy that does not need the perception of the hated object in order to live, having acquired an independent and permanent existence without which obsession is impossible. In short, the “jealousy” of these lower beings seems to me reducible to discontinuously repeated emotions. But the ill-defined, ambiguous terminology of affective psychology encourages confusion. It must nevertheless be acknowledged that this instinctive antipathy contains a confused notion of dispossession. It marks a character beginning to take shape, for not all animals and not all children are jealous. It is the embryo of jealousy, and these facts compel us to admit that, among the passions, jealousy is one of the earliest to appear.

So far we have tried to sketch the genealogy of the universal passions. By this epithet I mean the most widespread and common, those belonging to every time and place, which exist in primitive humanity as in the most advanced civilizations. These are the typical passions. Most authors who have treated this subject confine themselves to them. Yet there are others which they forget or mention only in passing, and which deserve the same study. These are less widespread, rarer: comparatively speaking, only a small number of people experience them. Apart from this somewhat vague characteristic, nothing particularly distinguishes them from the preceding ones. We might say that they are more complex; but ambition and love are often equally so. Most have a collective character and reach their full development only as social manifestations; but this observation does not strictly apply to all. We might also say that they are less selfish and more impersonal. Yet all these features together do not allow us to draw a line separating them from the others. Despite some differences, this chapter will therefore continue the preceding one. We shall chiefly study the passionate state in its aesthetic, religious, and political forms, then a few divergent types which, because of the smallness of their object, I call the minor passions.

If the study of the passions had not always concentrated on a small number, especially love, aesthetic passion would have deserved the honor of a thorough examination. Following the plan I have adopted and previously explained, that cannot be attempted here: the subject is very complex if we wish to discover its general characteristics across the variations produced by different arts, temperaments, and forms of civilization. We would have to take care not to base this study solely on our contemporaries.

Let me briefly recall that authors show an unusual degree of agreement about the origin of aesthetic feeling. Its source lies in a surplus of life, in a luxurious, disinterested activity: art is a form of play. Recently, Groos has replaced the thesis of an excess of energy with that of a primitive instinct expressed in every form of play, aesthetic activity being “a play of inner imitation.” Its teleological justification lies in the usefulness of expending accumulated forces, but above all in the pleasure of feeling free from every purpose, “in the pleasure of the feeling of freedom as such.”¹

“In ordinary life,” says Groos, “with its instincts pushing and jostling one another, the appearance of things [der Schein] is never more than a means of rising from sensory impression to understanding and will. We use these appearances only to acquire knowledge, because this is the only way to act in relation to things, avoiding them when they may harm us and using them as promptly as possible when they seem desirable. Dominated as he is by the multitude of real interests, a person has no time to linger lovingly in the contemplation of appearance.

“It is quite otherwise when he allows imagination to play freely within him. What a change then takes place! No image could express it better than this: the state of mind of a working day is replaced by that of a holiday.... It is no mere accident that heavenly bliss has always been identified with the contemplation of God and his magnificence; for no state of human consciousness puts every selfish interest so far into the background as pure contemplation does.

“The difference between appearance in general and aesthetic appearance is, in fact, a difference of intensity: the first serves, the second governs; one is fleeting, the other holds us captive. Whenever the mere appearance of things occupies the summit of consciousness for a long time, the aesthetic phenomenon arises within us.”

These quotations are no digression. They help us understand what aesthetic life is and how it can concentrate into a great passion; but this passion is rare and inaccessible to the majority of people.

Aesthetic feeling has its degrees, in the active form of the creator and in the contemplative form of the appreciator. Let us note that these two cases, however far apart they may seem, necessarily share a common basis. The appreciator must, to the best of his abilities, repeat the creator’s work. Without some affinity of nature with him, however slight, he will feel nothing and understand nothing; he must live his life and play his game, unable to produce for himself but able and compelled to be an echo. It is not even paradoxical to maintain that aesthetic passion belongs more particularly to the dilettante. In him, at any rate, it occurs in a pure state, freed from the operations necessary to the work of creation but foreign to passion.

At the lowest degree, the aesthetic need appears in human beings only in fleeting gleams and as an accessory, although it dates from humanity’s earliest ages, as research into the beginnings of art shows: prehistoric drawings and the rudimentary dance, music, and poetry of peoples described as savage.

Higher up, devotion to art becomes a permanent state: the ancient bards, rhapsodes, jongleurs, troubadours or trouvères, many medieval architects, and painters or sculptors on the threshold of the Renaissance. But in their case we must allow a large share to professional zeal; the taste for art is reinforced by the love of gain. They practiced their trade without believing that their art made them superior to the average of humanity. At the same level we may place appreciators who frequently need aesthetic satisfaction, who feel its absence and seek it instead of waiting for chance and circumstances to supply it: a taste for the spectacles of nature, the applied arts, poetry and imaginative literature, and attendance at theaters, museums, and concerts.

So far we discover nothing resembling a passion. Must we attribute it to those great creators who produce their works through an innate gift, as naturally as a tree covers itself with fruit? Such are Shakespeare or Lope de Vega, Dante or Molière, Raphael or Rubens, Mozart or Rossini. The question is difficult, because no single answer can apply to all these personalities. Yet since passion consists in being possessed by a dominant, directing, and tenacious idea, we must grant them all a passion for their art, with the reservation that it does not in all of them reach the extreme point, the finished form, the fullness of every great passion. By way of clarification, let us compare the degrees of aesthetic life with those of religious life, which are more common, more readily grasped, and better known. There are sincere believers, constant in their faith and regular in their observances, but without aspiration toward the ideal. Above them is the ardent, higher faith of those who devote themselves fervently to religious life while guarding against every excess: a moderate passion. Higher still is the burning faith which, in the form of asceticism, mysticism, or fanaticism, consumes the whole person. Aesthetic passion has its corresponding phase. Let us see what characterizes it.

Aesthetic passion begins when art is posited as an absolute good, the supreme object of desire, the object of a love without bounds or restrictions, equal to the extreme forms of human or divine love. The creator or dilettante attributes a sacred character to art; it is a religion of which they are the priests. This apotheosis of art, which is the substance of their passion, seems to derive from a double source.

The artist, especially the poet, is inspired, a revealer, a prophet, a seer who rises far above humanity’s average level. This belief is found in antiquity, even among philosophers: Plato’s description of the poet as sacred.^E1

The artist lives eternally in human memory and through the succession of ages; he can even confer immortality on others.

We have now risen to a very high pitch, to that state of intoxication appropriate to every great passion. The apotheosis of art in its fullness and without reservations was affirmed by Schelling’s school and the German Romanticism of that period: Novalis, Jean Paul, F. Schlegel, and others. This affirmation did not die with them; it persists among their contemporary successors in other forms and formulas. Arising from philosophical idealism, it sometimes has the appearance, and even the reality, of a metaphysical passion.²

Historically, this passion for art, blind, boundless, and almost intolerant, has blossomed only recently, and scarcely any examples can be found before the nineteenth century. Why? First, because for many people art has become a substitute for a failing religion, the preferred form of an ideal that offers consolation for everyday vulgarity. Second, because these “aesthetes” tend to isolate themselves completely from active life and plunge into the world of imagination, whether to create or merely to play as dilettantes. By contrast, compare them with the great writers and artists of Spain in its golden age, almost all great gentlemen who had fought in twenty campaigns and passed through astonishing adventures, most often to die in a monk’s habit. However ample their aesthetic life, it was only one part of them.

Is it necessary to show that aesthetic passion cannot be denied the classic characteristics of every great passion?

The fixed idea, here called the ideal, the sole center of attraction, organizes life according to its own type, acting as in love through alternations of fervor and dryness. As exclusive as any other passion toward whatever does not suit its nature or provide it with nourishment, it shuts itself within an impassable magic circle. It sees people and things only from its particular point of view. By the natural logic of his passion, the aesthete admires a “beautiful catastrophe” or a “beautiful crime”: something the moralist cannot accept or even understand, because for him the aesthetic value of the event is nothing compared with its social value.

Then there is duration, stability. The permanent and obsessive need to live in another world reveals itself especially among appreciators and dilettantes, for the reasons given above. Art is not an amusement or a relaxation; that opinion is sacrilege. It is the need to commune with the ideal; it is the pursuit of the pleasure of possession which, once satisfied, begins again, because the goal pursued is not an abstraction but an object of love that its multiple manifestations do not exhaust.³

Yet the aesthetic need, at once heightened and inexhaustible, that is, the need always to live in the world of imaginative creation, and the continually renewed desire to be victorious in love and possess one’s ideal, do not exhaust the psychology of this passion. There is a reverse side: pride or vanity, according to character, which belongs to the nature of this tendency, a particular form of the “will to power.” Aesthetic activity, as we are told endlessly, is an end in itself; it demands absolute freedom, “a pleasure of its own that tolerates no law above it,” which is scarcely less than omnipotence. This is why those possessed by a passion for art lay down as an indisputable postulate that aesthetic activity is superior to every other. What history teaches us about the madness of power and the intoxication of might may, allowing for differences of scale, be applied here. “I have slept in the bed of kings,” Napoleon said, “and caught a terrible disease there.” Hence contempt for others, because one considers oneself superior, or hatred if one considers oneself merely undervalued. We know, too, how easily aesthetic passion slips into pathology. I have nothing to say about that here, having excluded every study of morbid states from this work and sketched it elsewhere (Psychologie des sentiments, part II, chapter X, § 5). There I observed that the pathology of aesthetic feeling does not exist in its own right; it is only one expression among many of a predisposition that can develop only in the few who possess the power of creative imagination.

I deliberately omit the passion for science, which would add no new element to our study. It is only a particular case of the affective state accompanying every form of activity directed toward a goal that involves successes and failures. It differs from the passion of the hunter, explorer, or even conqueror only in its object, its material, not its nature: truth is the quarry or the spoils.

It is grafted onto a primordial need, the need to know, without which no animal could survive, since knowledge of its environment is indispensable for acting and defending itself; it is an instrument and a weapon. Passion additionally requires an exclusive and stable orientation toward inquiry.

By nature this passion is comparatively static; but it takes a dynamic form in those fighters determined to demolish traditional errors and prejudices sanctioned by dominant religions or official teaching.

In its pure state it contains no other elements. I have observed that it is not easy to cite many cases of this kind, because it is often nourished and sustained by extraneous motives: the desire for success, influence, wealth, or fame; in short, ambition in its many forms. Having already treated this subject in detail (Psychologie des sentiments, part II, chapter XI), I hope the reader will forgive me for avoiding repetition.

Religious feeling, a compound affective state, as we know, has its degrees and reaches its highest point in religious passion. This has four principal forms: contemplative and individual in character, it manifests itself in mysticism or asceticism; active and social in character, it works either through persuasion or through force.

I. Mysticism has been extensively studied in its psychology, physiology, and pathology. Its principal features are so well known that to dwell on them would run counter to our plan; I shall merely mark its place. Its equivalence to human love is generally admitted; moments of ecstasy would correspond to possession. It has been compared especially with Platonic love. Neither of these affective forms exists among the uncivilized. Leuba regards them “as a response of the psychophysiological organization to new needs, as a means invented by it to attain its ends, as a case of internal adaptation.”

Asceticism is intimately linked to mysticism and most often accompanies it. It is above all a means of training (askein); but in this frenzy of austerities and mortifications which not infrequently borders on madness, we find in some ascetics a passionate desire with an intellectual goal that seems to me to have been overlooked. This is because asceticism has been studied only among Christians. Christianity lays down the principle that human nature is flawed and corrupt from its origin, but that we can nevertheless remedy this through heroic treatment, through sacrifice and suffering voluntarily accepted, even sought and desired. Asceticism is a set of therapeutic procedures tending toward moral purification.⁴ Mortification is not merely physical; it does not consist solely in treating the body as a source of temptation, depravity, and obstacles to holiness. The mind too must be diminished, humbled, subdued, stripped of the greater part of its desires and will. Let us also note that several religions hold human suffering to be pleasing to the Divinity. In sum, Christian asceticism is both physical and mental. Considered by itself, it appears essentially to be moral training toward the possession of God.

If we leave Christian asceticism to study other forms, we encounter facts and opinions that at first bewilder us. Let us turn to India, the classic land of exalted monasticism. The sacred books and great poems frequently tell of ascetics whose extravagant mortifications frighten the gods, who, trembling at the prospect of being dethroned, invent temptations and stratagems to overcome these enthusiasts. We also find extraordinary beliefs such as this one, which the history of religions records without dwelling on it: the god Shiva, the supreme creator and destroyer of the world, submitting himself to “terrifying” mortifications. Our Western ideas are baffled. What purpose can these tortures serve, since he has neither a fault to expiate nor a god to please by his sufferings?

In my view, this frenzied and endless asceticism is explained by intellectual reasons. It rests on the idea that the senses and everything arising from the body limit our faculty of knowledge, and that through this physical annihilation we can reach the state of pure thought and beatific vision. The ascetic’s procedures help him advance along the path of meditation and approach the contemplation of higher truths. This intellectual position of Eastern religious mysticism seems to me also to be that of the German Romantics mentioned above when they preached philosophical suicide. “The truly philosophical act,” writes Novalis, “is suicide. This act alone meets all the conditions of an activity beyond the world. By ostracizing the essential part of himself, through an energetic concentration of his whole being, a person discovers a new, transcendent point of view on the other side of life. He feels a new adaptation taking place; unexplored faculties of vision and speculation develop within him. This training is philosophical suicide.”⁵

On reflection, one is inclined to admit that this form of religious feeling might be added to the list of intellectual passions. It is certainly closer to Spinoza’s amor intellectualis, which is contemplation and absorption in the infinite, than to the affective outpourings of pure mystics such as Saint Teresa.

II. Religious passion in its active, social form manifests itself in two ways: one is more positive, assimilating or conquering through persuasion; the other more negative and conservative, working through persecution. In both cases it is a more complex psychological combination than contemplative mysticism.

1. The active form is the most complex and vigorous manifestation of religious feeling. It is summed up in the apostolate, the need to convert. As alive and insatiable as love, this passion is stopped neither by obstacles nor by dangers nor by the certainty of death; it even seeks them. Besides the religious element that gives it its distinctive stamp, it requires: first, an altruistic tendency, an ardent sympathy for the infidels or unbelievers who must be instructed and saved; second, a surplus of outward-directed life and a need for conquering expansion; third, in some people, the ardent desire for travel, adventure, and the unknown that makes explorers.

Here, then, is a very compound passion. Accordingly, it appears only with the so-called universal religions: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. This moment marks the emancipation of religious feeling, which detaches itself from the nation, believing itself suited to every time and place.

The passion of the apostolate is so well known through biographies that it is unnecessary to bring out its fixed idea, duration, unshakable stability, in short, all the characteristics of the greatly passionate. A single example will suffice: Saint Francis Xavier, whom a Protestant historian calls the Alexander of missionaries, and whose whole character is contained in his conquering motto, “amplius,” more. Before leaving, he would not even see his ancestral castle one last time. In Mozambique, ignorant of the language, he evangelizes by gestures; from Goa, where he reforms morals, he moves to the Coromandel Coast, into burning regions scarcely tolerable even to the inhabitants, and, consumed by fever, pursues his preaching. From there to Malacca, the Moluccas, Japan, where he first succeeds and is then expelled; then to China, where he dies at Canton, aged forty-six. The first regions of Japan in which he preached converted rapidly: “He left,” says a biographer; “for the missionary, this people was too responsive to the promptings of grace; he needed more animated struggles.”

2. Religious passion manifested through persecution arises only as a reaction. In a social body without unbelievers or dissenters, it would not exist. Its nature is negative. The psychological combination from which it results is therefore quite different from that of the positive form. Besides religious feeling, the element common to both, it contains first an antipathetic, no longer sympathetic, tendency toward unbelievers: a defensive attitude, the first stage; then a tendency to treat them as rebels: an offensive attitude, the second stage. It too seeks to conquer, but through coercion rather than assimilation. Religious passion does not, moreover, seem stronger in one case than in the other. Its direction depends on the individual character, which may be sympathetic and expansive or authoritarian and narrow, as in Calvin, and on the environment in which the passion develops. In the Middle Ages, the religious passion dividing Spaniards and Arabs was at the same time a national struggle; wars of religion are always accompanied by political hatreds.

Thus psychological analysis of these four forms shows that religious passion takes on very different aspects as secondary elements are added or removed, while the principal element remains the same: pure inwardness, outward radiation, unlimited expansion through sympathy, blind tyranny and cruelty judged legitimate and necessary.

One final observation. More than one reader may ask: Is religious passion anything other than ardent faith? Certainly not; but here we see this faith only from its affective side. Every belief contains two elements: its content, accepted as knowledge without demonstrable objectivity; and the subjective attitude of the mind, the assent, the affirmation, which is fundamentally a preference, a choice, or an attraction. This attractive tendency has every degree: religious passion is an affirmation that nothing can shake; the strength of the passion measures that of the belief. “Faith,” Leuba rightly says, “is a centralization of psychophysiological activity, and as such it opposes the persistence in consciousness of ideas and feelings that do not favor it.” Is this not the character of every passion?

Political passion originates in a very simple tendency, since it is found even in many animals: the social instinct, or the tendency to live in groups. It is the passion of the human being insofar as he is by nature a political animal, a politikon zōon. But this social tendency, emerging from its primitive simplicity, must undergo many additions and transformations before becoming political passion, a complex state with its own characteristics, which distinguish it from two passions often confused with it: one personal, ambition; the other collective, patriotism, the social form of the instinct of self-preservation.

I need not trace the development of the social instinct from the moment when it is confined to a small group such as the clan, where everyone knows everyone else and is in contact with them, to the comprehensive forms existing in great civilizations and great states, where solidarity is represented, thought, rather than perceived. Political passion appears late in the history of the individual and in that of humanity. Let us take it fully constituted, to investigate first its elements and then its forms.

Beforehand, it is worth observing that we deliberately exclude, as we have always done so far, the emotionally impulsive, who are distinct from the category of the passionate. The former are excitable, restless people with the characteristics of their kind. They are numerous; politics exerts so evident an attraction on those predisposed to it that it would be idle to insist. What environment could be more favorable to the emergence and development of instinctive drives and irresistible impulses? At certain moments in a people’s history, its government is in the hands of the half-mad. We must acknowledge, however, that in practice it is not always easy to distinguish the restless from the passionate, especially in collective movements. Thus the enthusiasm of the French before the Festival of the Federation, so brilliantly described by Michelet and Carlyle, when everyone, young and old, humble and great, worked day and night on the preparations: was this a movement of great passion? Was it not rather an epidemic of emotions and impulses?

Be that as it may, passionate people, fanatics in the strict sense, are not lacking, and history supplies sufficiently numerous and clear examples to distinguish two principal types: realists and idealists.

1. The realist type is by far the more frequent. Let us examine the elements that constitute its psychology.

The social instinct alone would not suffice to engender political passion. It is only a raw material that must be joined by another tendency, the will to power, which in this case is the ardent desire to govern in order to preserve or innovate, to defend an ideal or impose it. In fact, among realists, political passion and personal ambition merge, although they maintain, and sometimes sincerely believe, that by increasing their power they are working above all for the general good. Great political passion draws the ambitious person toward an impersonal goal coinciding with the personal one: Cromwell, Robespierre, and others. Fanaticism thus constituted can exist in a single individual or in a party without changing its character. Add an implacable hatred of opponents, identical in nature with that of religious fanaticism described above. I omit some lesser factors: pride or vanity, the latter more frequent among the impulsive. All this forms a bundle of solid elements, vigorous in action, and it is unnecessary to point out the marks of great passion: an obsessive fixed idea, invisible tenacity, energy.^E2

2. Blind belief, resistant to every assault, which is the basis of political as of religious fanaticism, is common to both forms; but among idealists it appears stripped bare and borders on mysticism.

Among the elements of realist passion, we have just enumerated hatred of dissenters, the feeling of social solidarity, the assertion of the will to power in the form of an ideal to be realized, ambition, and pride; let us add hypocrisy and cunning. Simplify this psychological combination, reduce it to its first two factors, and we have the idealist form. Stripped of selfish designs, it tends to become impersonal, and the passionate person sees himself as the instrument of a higher power to which he offers himself in sacrifice. The idealist fanatic, who often lives like an ascetic, is ready for anything in absolute devotion to the cause, for the triumph of his ideal. At this degree, passion resembles an imperative; it is not only an irresistible force of nature but also a command. It takes on a moral and religious aspect. We have seen that in love the sexual instinct and tender affections are so frequently united that common opinion regards them as inseparable. The same holds for political passion and personal ambition, which also seem always associated: the idealist type demonstrates their independence by separating them.

In the end, both types show the same implacability. The idealist kills because, possessing absolute truth, he has the right to impose it, and death appears to him a penalty commanded by justice. The realist kills because he must have power, and the surest way to defeat his adversaries is to eliminate them. “We shall turn France into a cemetery,” Carrier said, “rather than fail to regenerate it.”

After the constituent elements of political passion, let us note its principal distinguishing characteristics.

The first is that it is necessarily collective; it sustains itself only through communion with others possessed by it. It cannot live in isolation like love, avarice, pure ambition, and so forth; it is propagandist by nature. In most societies, all citizens, by instinct or reflection, concern themselves with political and social events, believing they have some direct or indirect interest in variations or changes in institutions. Only the person convinced that he has nothing to gain or lose remains indifferent, as among certain peoples of the East. This passion, which draws a considerable part of its strength from outside, thus finds nourishment easily.

Another, more distinctive characteristic is that it follows an accelerating movement, continually increasing until it dies of its own excess, which is a kind of suicide. This point has often been noted. The initiators are absorbed and eliminated by their successors. “Human life,” says Macaulay, “runs with extreme rapidity in times of revolution. In a few hours one acquires the experience of many years. Deep-rooted habits are visibly broken, and novelties that at first inspired fear and repugnance quickly become familiar and attractive.” There are men who have a fever for twenty-four hours; I had it for ten years, said Baudot, a member of the Convention.

Since revolutions are evolutions proceeding at extreme speed, this accelerated movement would, according to Lombroso, be a case of the law of inertia,⁶ whose expression in the psychic and social world is “misoneism,” hatred of novelty, in religion, morality and customs, science, literature, the arts, fashion, and politics. Yet every revolution is necessarily the contrary, that is, “philoneism,” love of innovation. This general explanation seems unclear to me. Is it not rather analogous to what happens in the passions of conquest, such as ambition, gambling, and avarice, where gain seems capable of indefinite increase and each conquest calls forth another? The ideal of the first hour remains fundamentally the same, but at each new stage it appears fascinating, growing in perfection, demanding new efforts; it tends increasingly toward its absolute form. This is a familiar psychological case in which the imaginative person continually gives objective form to his own dream. Moreover, in the fanatic, the feverish state perpetually maintained by his surroundings, through a succession of reciprocal actions and reactions, keeps him in a state of high tension in which there are no longer obstacles or boundaries between the possible and the impossible.⁷

The social instinct is also the origin of a complex feeling that can become a great passion, leading to absolute devotion and death: patriotism. A few observations will suffice.

History shows that the idea of a homeland, and consequently patriotism, appears only at the end of a fairly long political and social evolution; some peoples never reach it. But this passion has its antecedents. The savage tribe, the small Greek city, the polis, and the medieval Italian commune survived only because their members possessed a feeling of solidarity, a desire for preservation and expansion. Is this not the very basis of love of country? Above these restricted and closed political forms stands the nation, a much more complex organism, since it encompasses and transcends differences of race, religion, language, customs, and culture. Consciousness of national life is summed up in the idea of a homeland, which gives cohesion and clarity to the feeling of social solidarity. This abstract idea arises from the condensation of multiple states and relations and, as such, is accessible only at a certain level of intellectual development. Once this degree of understanding has been reached, the law of transference, which we have studied elsewhere,⁸ and which is the great agent by which feelings pass from the particular to the universal, has enabled individual sympathy to extend to increasingly distant groups. Yet it is no exaggeration to maintain that through the embryonic, rudimentary, and incomplete forms of the earliest ages, there has been an ascent toward patriotism, from its most modest manifestations to its most impassioned outbursts, without any break in continuity.

In its psychological composition, patriotism is simpler than political passion, having, strictly speaking, only one element. The two passions are not only different in nature but sometimes opposed: political parties are not infrequently allied or in collusion with the country’s enemies. National feeling tends toward both unity and expansion; it is to the social body what the instinct of self-preservation is to the individual.

It is always necessarily collective, being a consensus of sympathetic aspirations, an implicit but real and continuous act of assent and solidarity. This does not go far enough. It has a gregarious character. I use this term for want of another to mean that the person passionately devoted to his country perpetually shares the feelings of his compatriots, and that national consciousness is present in its entirety in each individual. Pure patriotism is free from all personal ambition.

The reader may have noticed that most of the passions studied in this chapter, however different in their nature and ideal, resemble one another in their psychological development. Thus religious fanaticism and political fanaticism seem cast in the same mold; only their material differs. It is therefore appropriate to be brief about moral passion, to which the same observations apply.

The moral feeling from which it originates is, in most people, an affective disposition of moderate intensity, sufficient for everyday life, analogous to religious feeling, love of country, or the aesthetic need. Yet we know that love of the good, however conceived, can become a passion.

It manifests itself in two forms: through the apostolate of speech and through deeds.

1. It is clear that treatises on theoretical morality lie entirely outside our subject. Whether transcendent or drawn from experience, whether commanding or advising, whether adopting one regulative formula or another, they are intellectual works and nothing more, as incapable of engendering a passion “as a pure idea is of lifting a straw.” These learned speculations will have no effect on human activity unless they become a special religion. This must be understood in the strict sense. Except at the beginning of time, religion and morality are so closely linked that even today ethics, seeking emancipation, becomes a secular religion. Accordingly, scarcely any well-known examples of moral passion in the form of an apostolate can be found outside the history of religions: Christianity and Buddhism, especially the latter, because, without zeal for dogma or metaphysics and regarding inquiry into first causes as useless, it is wholly engaged in pursuing liberation through deeds. In this moral environment there have been people who, consumed by love of the good, have felt an insatiable need to pour their surplus into others, to bring about their radical conversion, and to place them too in the service of the good. Clearly, in this form moral passion is reinforced by the passion for conquest; with the necessary changes, it is an exact repetition of the religious apostolate, which spares us further discussion.

2. Manifestation through deeds is the simplest and purest form of moral passion: no foreign elements are added. It is not born of reasoning, reflection, or an abstract theory; it springs from an instinct, an innate disposition of character, which makes it so strong beside the weak and fragile works of intellectualism. It exists wholly in action and acts naturally. Such are the great benefactors of humanity whose names everyone knows. Beside them stand many others, founders of numerous institutions against poverty, vice, and disease, whose fame has been local, modest, or even less; yet they are no less greatly passionate people whose entire lives have been sacrificed to a single goal.

Our genealogical sketch would be incomplete if it omitted certain passionate states, fairly rare and peculiar in nature, known as the minor passions. This designation is ambiguous, for it might suggest that they are moderate in intensity or duration, which they are not. They are small in their material, their object: without wider reach, very limited, with no effects beyond the individual, and not very contagious. Yet they have all the characteristics of great passions, fixity and violence; they can cause illness, ruin, despair, theft, and crime. What sets them apart is the disproportion between the object of the passion and its violence. Most people judge it excessive because they experience these dispositions only in passing, as fancies or whims.

Yet these divergent forms of passionate life pose a difficult psychological problem concerning their nature and, above all, their origin.

1. A long enumeration of these minor passions is unnecessary and would always be incomplete, since changes in civilization or merely in fashion lengthen or shorten their list. Everyone knows them: bibliomaniacs; collectors of prints, medals, insects, or postage stamps; fanatics for tulips or any other kind of flower, and so forth. In all of them we first note a common tendency: to collect in order to keep, with a jealous selfishness. Consequently, when we try to penetrate the psychological constitution of these divergent types, we are immediately directed along a definite path.

There are people of impaired intellect who, at home or in asylums, gather everything they find, filling their pockets or cupboards with objects of every sort; but the automatism of these demented people can teach us nothing. There are reasonable collectors, but petty, prosaic, and ridiculous ones; they are very far from the passionate, who operate on a grand scale. Finally there are misers, of whom our passionate collectors are clearly a variety, though with notable differences.

The first difference is this: the miser’s ideal is the possession and uninterrupted increase of values acknowledged by everyone. The collector’s ideal is the possession and increase of values that count as such only for himself and his fellows.

The second difference is sharper. The miser’s passion is exercised only on material of practical value: land, houses, money, and so forth; a work of art is worth only its market value to him. The collector’s passion develops around superfluous, luxurious material, and for that reason has an aesthetic basis. As evidence we may cite not only its general uselessness but the fact that it always tends toward objects of art or science sought and loved in themselves and for their own sake. Already in antiquity, Pliny in his Natural History noted “this strange and sickly passion, which has almost the violence of love.” In that age of refined civilization, people fell in love with a vase or a ring. The celebrated Hortensius was so passionately attached to a sphinx of Corinthian bronze that he never parted from it. Our author speaks of a former consul so enamored of a cup carved from a precious stone that he had worn away its rim by kissing it: ob amorem abroso ejus margine. He was so little mistaken about the nature of this passion that, in relating other facts I omit, he used terms appropriate to love: dilexit, adamavit, amore captus est, libidine accensus, and so on.

Like every other passion, the collector’s has its degrees. But since people tend to see only its petty aspects and laugh at them, judging it as an intellectual fact rather than an affective state, it is worth recalling its effects, which measure its strength. I do not intend to pour out anecdotes scattered everywhere, but to establish an assessment through a few examples.

Celebrated scholars such as Budé, Turnèbe, and J. Scaliger used to say: Do you wish to know one of life’s great misfortunes? Sell your books. More than one person has wept at the thought of collections he once possessed; cases of suicide have even been reported. Petrarch, Berlin,^E4 and the bibliophile Brunet wished to die in their libraries, and everyone knows Mazarin’s farewells to his paintings, which he seemed to regret almost as much as power. Descuret observed several facts of this kind in his practice. “Colonel M..., known throughout Paris for his passion for medals, contracted pneumonia and had been in a comatose state for several hours. In his presence I repeated several times, very loudly, that there would soon be a sale of magnificent medals. The colonel vaguely articulated the word ‘medal,’ then gradually regained consciousness and recovered.” A few years later, an entire drawer of his medals was stolen. Descuret found him pale, haggard, beside himself. “Only one consolation remains,” he said; “the fools took only the gold medals. An inch lower were the large bronzes, the rare ones. I would not have survived their loss.”⁹

Minor passions are not harmful only to the person possessed by them; their effects often reach others through unscrupulous conduct, theft, and perhaps even crime.¹⁰

2. What is the origin of these divergent forms, and what conditions govern their genesis? This question is harder to resolve than that of their psychological constitution. We can venture only hypotheses.

We have seen that their primary origin is love of possession; but it undergoes a special deviation arising from individual character and external conditions.

First, it is clear that these passions require an above-average degree of culture and are impossible in an uncivilized environment. An illiterate person is not a bibliomaniac; someone indifferent to history or painting does not collect medals or pictures, nor does someone ignorant of entomology collect insects.

These passions are not, as has been said, spontaneous variations, which explains nothing; nor are they predispositions, since they usually appear late. They are deviations. A passion can deviate from its natural, typical form: love does so when it becomes Platonic; avarice is an abortive form of the will to power, since it accumulates power in order not to expend it. In passionate collectors, the tendency to possess and accumulate, utilitarian in its typical form, deviates toward luxury and uselessness through the addition of a second factor, aesthetic or scientific, and is thereby transformed.

These deviations therefore depend on circumstances and, above all, on personal dispositions. Minor passions are substitutes, diversions. They protect against avarice in the strict sense, senile love, gambling, and drinking.

In sum, they are made from the combination of two principal tendencies: one realist and utilitarian, the desire for possession; the other idealist and superfluous, the desire for what is rare and difficult to assemble. They border on aesthetic or scientific passion. Every passion presupposes some work of creative imagination. Avarice, as we have seen, requires less of it than any passion except the nutritive ones. In the minor passions, on the contrary, the play of fancy gives the illusion of inestimable value to objects indifferent to most people.

So far we have sought the origin of the passions only in needs, instincts, and tendencies. We observed in chapter I that not all these forms of human activity are capable of becoming passions, but we implicitly admitted that they alone are the source. A final question arises: Is there another source? Can emotions become passions, at least in a rudimentary form?

For clarity, given the vague terminology of affective psychology, I do not hesitate to recall the distinction previously established between simple affective states, emotions, and passions.

Let each of us picture the ordinary days of life that pass without accidents or notable incidents. Each action, work, business, recreation, meals, walks, family relations, encounters with various people, and so forth, is accompanied by a fairly weak affective coefficient. We do not rise above the level of moderate affective states; they are pleasant, painful, or mixed, according to whether our needs, tendencies, and inclinations are satisfied. This is the ultimate foundation on which our entire affective life rests. We feel only to the degree necessary for our personality to stamp its mark on what surrounds us, people and things.¹¹

But let an unforeseen event occur that arouses anger, fear, grief, joy, pride, or the like: emotion enters the scene. Most emotions begin with a sudden shock, followed by physiological and psychological manifestations proper to each kind. We need not describe these forms of affective life here. That work has been done in general treatises by Lange, James, and Mantegazza, or in monographs: Fear by Mosso, Anger by Stanley Hall, Sadness and Joy by G. Dumas, and others. Emotion is a complex, synthetic state, a definite, specific reaction adapted to a definite stimulus and to that stimulus alone. Moreover, like every other affective state, it rests on some primitive tendency. Indeed, remove from a person every tendency to attack, and there is no anger; every tendency to preserve himself by diminishing himself, and there is no fear; every tendency to expand through sympathetic fusion with others, and there is no tender emotion; every tendency to expand through exaltation of the self, and there is no pride; and so on.

Having recalled the nature and role of emotions, let us return to our question. Can a passion arise directly and immediately from an emotion? First reflection hardly inclines us toward an affirmative answer, because of the antithetical character of these two states, notably the instability of emotion and the stability of passion. Yet this is a question of fact that can be resolved only by the evidence of experience. Since emotions in general do not exist, the only procedure is to examine the primitive emotions one after another and see whether some do or do not become passions. For their nature might make the passage from the acute to the chronic state possible for some and impossible for others.

I begin with the stormiest, anger. The irascible temperament is obviously the least favorable to the genesis of a passion: let us see whether it produces one. “I have known men,” writes the naturalist Virey, “in whom irritability had become a need. They picked quarrels with everyone, especially their friends, for they required more attention from them than from anyone else. They were greatly disappointed when people refused to argue with them; and their servants knew that they would be treated even more roughly if they did not provide some small occasion for their masters’ habitual bad temper to discharge itself.” Alluding to cases of this kind, Bain (Emotions, chapter IX, 613)^E3 maintains the following strange thesis, directly relevant to our question. Having posited anger as the typical emotion, he enumerates under the name “species of anger” hatred, revenge, antipathy, hostility, and malevolence. Of hatred he says: “It is a permanent affection founded on anger.... Repeated occasions for anger ultimately produce an unkind attitude that disposes one to act with a view to revenge. To come truly to hate, it is enough to have an irascible character and to be exposed to frequent offenses.” This explanation is unacceptable, contradicted by experience, which shows us every day that the irascible are rarely hateful and can scarcely be so, because a fit of anger is an explosion, a discharge, whereas hatred is inhibition and accumulation, as we saw above in chapter II. A psychologist such as Bain would probably not have gone so seriously astray had he not overlooked the difference in nature between emotion and passion.

Fear presents itself in three forms: the emotional attack, terror or fright, which has no duration; panophobia, generalized fear without an assignable cause, a morbid state that we exclude; and finally the permanent disposition to fear, which is a modality of character, a way of reacting, and in no sense a passion.

Sadness is more difficult.¹² It too presents three principal forms: first, as a transitory disposition, a vague feeling without intensity; second, as resembling an emotion, with a sudden shock followed by depressive reactions, for example the grief caused by bad news or an unexpected disappointment; third, as inconsolable sorrow, the discovery of an incurable illness, the death of someone tenderly loved, a sentence of life imprisonment; in short, every case in which a misfortune is or seems irremediable, hopeless, endless. These cases deserve attention. Do we not find in them all the characteristics assigned to passions: a fixed and obsessive idea, duration, intensity? Like passions, they are often seen to end in wasting away or suicide.

Yet common opinion will refuse to equate grief without end with a passion. Is this a prejudice? No. Everyone is aware that his passion draws him toward an ideal he can attain; although he often struggles against its tyranny, he ends by obeying, willingly or unwillingly, because it is part of himself, because he is driven by desire and therefore by the attraction of something agreeable. In unshakable sadness, on the contrary, the idea appears as a foreign body, arriving from outside and lodged in the individual against his will, which no operation can remove except death. Despite certain appearances, sadness therefore cannot engender a passion.

Is the same true of joy? That is more doubtful. There is a passion for pleasure which, even if not strictly derived from the emotion of joy, is woven from it. For some people, the goal, the sole ideal of life, is amusement and diversion. Their life consists only of satisfactions and enjoyments. This is the obsessive, permanent, and violent need of a passion, accessible, moreover, only to a few, because it requires conditions that are only exceptionally found together: health, leisure, and wealth. It rarely flourishes alone; it needs companions. It therefore belongs to refined civilizations. Enjoyment soon reaches satiety; without imagination, invention, and renewal, this passion is always at risk of dying out. Its continuity is vague and its stability precarious.

Self-love, in the sense of love of oneself, of our personality, Selfeeling, Selbstgefühl, has two forms, one positive and the other negative, of which pride and humility may be taken as types. Pride, a permanent general disposition interrupted by sudden emotional surges, seems to me intimately related to the passion for honor, which we have not yet mentioned. This passion is not universal; it appears neither in all people nor in all times and places. A monograph on it, still unwritten, would require the cooperation of psychology and history.

Psychologically, it rests on an exaggerated feeling of our personal worth, pride, or an exaggerated need for the esteem of others, an excessive desire for praise, vanity; often on both in varying proportions. At its highest degree, faith in the personal honor to be safeguarded takes on that imperative character we have noted in other passions. Like love of God or duty, it imposes great sacrifices. It is a passion with a tragic outcome: voluntary exile, suicide, death from grief at dishonor.

Historically, this feeling, by no means foreign to ancient peoples whatever may have been said, reached its height in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in Christian and Muslim civilizations. Women exerted a great influence on its development in the direction of vanity rather than pride. I need not treat the subject, but it would be easy to show that the passion for honor has been absent in individuals and peoples lacking neither pride nor courage.

In sum, the question we posed admits no single answer. Certain emotions resist every transformation into passion. Others can, with time, metamorphose into a state analogous to passion. Others engender mixed, hybrid states, transitional forms between pure emotion and passion. In most cases, emotions, through their nature and repetition, become dispositions to react in a special and exclusive direction, the equivalent of a partial character.

We shall not prolong this study, which we believe somewhat artificial but which had to be attempted. Because of the extraordinary abuse of the word “emotion,” applied indiscriminately to everything, from barely conscious affective states to violent reactions, some authors have maintained, without further specification, that emotion engenders passion. In fact, only tendencies engender it. The emotional shock may be a preamble, a trial, a precursor, a stage, but it no more becomes passion in the strict sense than acute attacks become a chronic illness: chronicity arises from deeper and older causes of which the attacks were the first revelation. Even where emotion seems to become a passion, it undergoes so many metamorphoses that it is, properly speaking, only a starting point, a historical date, a lightning strike, an origin more apparent than real.

A classification of tendencies has been attempted; none is possible for the passions. It may be objected that antiquity, the Cartesians, and the nineteenth-century phrenologists confidently took this path. But under this heading they classified affective states of every kind, especially the disciples of Gall, rather than passions in the limited and precise sense.

Moreover, how are they to be classified? According to their object? Then they will be innumerable. New ones arise every day at the whim of inventions and fashion, grafted, it is true, onto an old stem; others disappear and become rarities.

The possibility of classifications in pathology has been invoked. The two cases are not comparable, because disease has as its substratum an organ or at least a function, which supplies a fixed basis.

Accordingly, in the preceding genealogical account, I have contented myself with the division into dynamic and static passions according to the motor constitution of each passion and its modalities: the former expansive and close to impulse; the latter concentrated, acting chiefly through inhibition. Yet even this division is superficial and expresses a difference of form more than of inner nature. Taking all the passions enumerated above, it is impossible to assign them strictly to one or the other class. According to temperament, character, or merely circumstances, they pass from the static to the dynamic type or conversely: Philip II’s cold, bureaucratic ambition is not that of his great-grandfather Charles the Bold; and the political passion of our Louis XI does not resemble Napoleon’s in form. This observation, applicable to almost every passion, is unnecessary for those who remember that, despite general formulas, only passionate individuals exist.

Before answering the question posed by this title, it would be natural to explain how passions develop; but such an attempt might produce only a schematic and arbitrary construction. Not only does this development vary with individuals; it also differs entirely according to the nature of each passion. Ambition does not evolve like love, nor political fanaticism like avarice. It is therefore best to confine ourselves, if possible, to bringing out the general characteristics of this evolution, those found everywhere or in the great majority of cases.

Every passion seems to form through slow processes, like geological deposits. To use the pathologists’ favorite expression, its onset is slow and insidious. This assertion seems to me compelled by the observation of properly interpreted facts. I know that in many circumstances experience appears to contradict it; but we must penetrate beyond appearances and see the reality. Provisionally, let us distinguish two cases: those in which this assertion cannot be doubted, and those in which it is doubtful. Let us examine them separately.

Most often, passion is already virtually formed before it reveals itself to consciousness. Without speaking of the subterranean work, unconscious or subconscious, which is a highly probable if not certain hypothesis, there first appear in consciousness fragmentary, scattered, momentary tendencies, all directed the same way, toward attraction or repulsion concerning the same person, thing, or idea. This movement of advances or retreats follows the law of nervous excitation; it proceeds like an avalanche, it snowballs, or, in scientific language, it acts by summation. What is called the influence of habit on the genesis and maintenance of a passion, which we shall examine in detail later, is nothing else. Passion acts like the organism which, in the very development of its nutrition, draws new resources for feeding still more abundantly. It asserts itself in the direction of desire or aversion, drawing to itself and assimilating all the value judgments that favor its expansion, while rigorously excluding the others. Its activity increases with its acquired momentum. As an illustration, let us take an example less commonplace than the usual passions of love, gambling, money, and the like. It is not uncommon to meet people who, before any test, declare themselves inaccessible to a certain feeling, maternal love, for example, especially in its passionate form. This is a case of affective illusion, a fact psychology has not yet studied and which would deserve study. Circumstances change and, after a period of indifference or indecision, the feeling of which one believed oneself incapable is born; little by little it rises above the average level and sometimes becomes an obsessive, blind passion, eventually unbearable to its object. The affective disposition, embryonic, virtual, merely possible, has through a slow, unconscious, unacknowledged transformation made a passionate person. What favors this work of development and assimilation is that passion gradually appears to us as part of ourselves, as our own work. There is, moreover, a definite and precise fact marking the moment when passion is constituted, which can serve as a criterion: the appearance of the dominant, directing idea, recognized as such. Whether we accept it, resist, or try to resist, the fact is accomplished; the period of birth is over. Most often, then, everything happens without our knowledge or without sufficient awareness of the movement carrying us along, so that when the moment comes when the situation is clear even to the least perceptive, astonishment follows.

Cases in which passion seems to arise suddenly require closer examination. Everyone knows love’s “thunderbolt,” the instinctive and sudden hatred felt at the sight of a stranger, the vertigo that draws one into games of chance, and so forth. This unexpected eruption, which, let us note in passing, occurs only with dynamic passions, seems to contradict the thesis of slow processes. But if we study the facts more precisely, we see that this first moment is emotion and nothing more: the sudden reaction to a shock, the almost reflex response of a preestablished mechanism, a state of mental confusion and intellectual disorganization from which only an irresistible tendency toward a goal emerges. It is the moment of conception, not of the birth of passion; passion is engendered but not brought into the world. It must pass through a more or less brief embryonic period in which it sheds the characteristics of emotion and takes on its own.

It could plausibly be maintained that more than once the “thunderbolt” has been preceded by an incubation period unknown to the individual, so that this flash in the night is only the sudden revelation of unconscious work, as sometimes happens in great inventors or simply in someone discovering his vocation; it is not a creation from nothing. I acknowledge that this hypothesis does not apply to every case, and it is preferable in any event to reason only from facts clear and verifiable to everyone.

For passion, a stable state, to replace emotion, a fleeting phenomenon, a more or less long period of metamorphosis is required. If, instead of borrowing our comparison from embryology as above, we seek it in pathology, we may say: an acute illness can become chronic only through losses, additions, changes, and transformations of state. In a word, emotion is a preformed organism; passion is a construction which, however rapid, cannot be made in an instant: it requires fixity and time. This explains why, as we saw in an earlier chapter, impulsive and explosive temperaments, subject to sudden and violent emotions, are not suited to becoming truly passionate. They are fireworks; the others are blast furnaces that burn continually. At most they are capable of a few little passions without duration which, despite their ardor, are only prolonged emotions. And as for passions beginning with a “thunderbolt,” has anyone ever noted how long they last? Certainly there are many possible degrees between emotion and slowly established passion; but a passion that does not sufficiently free itself from the turbulent elements of emotion, that undergoes only an incomplete transformation, is condemned to a precarious existence: it is a child that will not live. To conclude, cases supposedly without incubation or slow processes are at most an abbreviated gestation. Everything is prepared beforehand, and the external event is only the spark that ignites the powder.

After these preliminary observations, let us return to our question: How do passions end? In several ways, their disappearance resulting from very dissimilar causes. Yet these seem reducible to a few principal forms: a passion dies out through exhaustion or habit; through transformation into another; through substitution; through madness; or through death.

In all these forms, one element can serve as a firm and reliable indicator of fluctuations in the passionate state, a kind of thermometer. It reveals to the observer progress, regression, change, and acute exacerbation. This principal element is the fixed idea. If it becomes increasingly intermittent, the passion is moving toward extinction; if a rival idea arises, substitution is beginning; if it becomes the incessant and inescapable obsession studied by alienists, it announces a catastrophic end. I need not repeat that the idea alone, as a merely intellectual state, does not possess this revealing power; it owes all its diagnostic and prognostic value to the tendency it expresses in consciousness. It is the hand of the clock, not the spring that moves it.

Before examining these various forms separately, the only general conclusion that can be drawn from them, which I indicate in advance, is this: the probability that a passion will die out is directly proportional to the quantity of emotional elements it contains and inversely proportional to the quantity of intellectual elements it contains in a systematized state. Other things being equal, static passions, which are reasoned and inhibitory by nature, are more stable than dynamic passions, which are naturally impulsive.

1. An ending through exhaustion, satiation, or satiety is the simplest and most frequent. To endure, every passion presupposes psychic and physical conditions, which I shall briefly summarize before studying the principal one.

In the psychological order, there are first intellectual requirements. For the initial tendency to be more than a crude and short-lived frenzy, the passionate person’s mind must not be without resources: a clear understanding of the goal, skill, and the ability to adapt to circumstances. Who does not know how many have failed in the pursuit of power in all its forms, not through lack of desire but through lack of appropriate means? This is the reverse equivalent of intelligent people without the capacity to will. Then there are active, practical conditions: energy or gentleness, violence or patience, audacity or circumspection. The will must serve when it is not wholly enslaved. Every passion must sustain the struggle for existence, first to dominate, then to consolidate itself; for no passion lives by inertia alone or by habit, as we shall see below. The absence or weakness of these mental qualities is a cause of fragility.

In the physiological order, let us first recall such debilitating causes as physical weakness, illness, age, grief, and everything that diminishes life. But besides these familiar causes, there is another, deeper one, on which we must insist because it is the ultimate reason for the ending through exhaustion.

At present, no one disputes the predominant influence of the organism and internal sensations throughout affective life. This influence is direct in nutritive and sexual passions and indirect in more intellectualized passions. It derives from a general property of tissues and organs: excitability, especially that of the nervous system. In contrast to the apathetic, or lymphatic, who are little disposed to emotions and passions, excitable people feel and react keenly; they are emotional or passionate. Let us exclude the former as outside our subject, merely observing that in them excitability is diffuse and intermittent, whereas in the passionate it is physiologically localized and psychologically specialized.

Although a scientific physiology of the passions remains to be established, although it cannot sufficiently determine the general conditions of every passion, still less the particular conditions of each one, we can safely affirm this: if it is unreasonable to suppose a “seat” of the passions in the sense that some physiologists seem to admit, that is, a narrow localization in some part of the brain, nevertheless, since every passion, even the simplest, is an aggregate of psychic elements of different kinds, desires or aversions, movements, perceptions, images, concepts, and since each of these elements necessarily has a physical and cerebral substratum, we must admit a dispersed and coordinated localization whose synthetic unity is the passion. Each of these elements must perform work and expend energy. Now passion results from diverting the total energy to its own advantage, a condensation of the personality into a single predominant form; this partial hypertrophy is necessarily compensated by the wasting away of the rest. Thus love, as the popular saying has it, “makes one forget to eat and drink.” But inherent in this functional overactivity is an internal cause of exhaustion, because great passions do not submit to the alternating rhythm of activity and rest that governs biological phenomena. Certainly the passionate person is not always and without interruption prey to his obsession, though I note that some positively affirm the contrary; the events of everyday life cause inevitable interruptions. But if obsession is not always present in consciousness, is the same true in the unconscious? Is the latent work in the brain and the organs depending on it interrupted? Nothing proves it. In the greatly passionate, probability seems rather to favor continuity of excitation; without this permanence, the stability and reappearance of the fixed idea are difficult to explain. The individual would therefore remain in a perpetual state of tension or action. Now it is a biological fact that excitability disappears more rapidly as physicochemical phenomena become more intense; the more active the living being, the more causes of destruction it encounters. Gradually, repair becomes unable to compensate for wear, and excitability disappears.

This state of satiety or exhaustion is expressed psychologically by the complete or almost complete disappearance of appetite or aversion: passion is thus dried up at its source. Exhaustion or satiety therefore means that the expansive or repulsive tendency, formerly vigorous, can no longer be aroused by an unconscious or subconscious stimulus, or by the perception or representation of its former object. More precisely still, this absence of excitability consists in the impossibility of the spontaneous appearance of organic sensations together with the tendency, that is, the nascent movements they naturally involve; or in the impossibility of the same event being aroused by perceptions, images, or ideas. The first case concerns passions in which the organic element has the largest share, for example the extinction of sensual love. The second concerns passions in which intellectual elements are most important, for example disgust with power or, in the case of momentary exhaustion, the mystics’ state of “dryness.”

In sum, this state of unexcitability consists in the fact that the nervous elements, whatever they are and however they group and coordinate themselves to produce a definite tendency and thereby arouse the psychic states whose complex constitutes a passion, are incapable of acting, as though anesthetized. When we examine the conditions under which this unexcitability occurs, what should astonish us is not that passion exhausts itself but that it lasts so long.

Once this exhaustion has occurred, quickly or slowly, the passion is dead and replaced by indifference. Of the people, things, places, and everything associated with it, only a dry memory remains, a purely intellectual state devoid of all affective resonance.

We briefly noted above the relations between passion and habit, but we must return to them. Habit, a general property of the physical and psychic organism, does not enter passion as a constituent element; it is an accessory factor acting through its influence.

As the expression of a biological fact, the term “habit” is clear: it designates an acquired disposition. The causes producing it are not always the same. It may result from active adaptation, from the plasticity of the living and thinking being. It may be only a form of organic memory, that is, a tendency of the organism to preserve indefinitely an impression received. It is unnecessary to enter into details on this subject or on the distinction between active and passive habits. We take habit simply as a fact. As a principle of stability and permanence, its influence on passions, which are also stable states, must be examined.

Experience seems to show three different cases: habit is useless, useful, or harmful.

1. In true passion, continually alive and renewed, there is no habit in the strict sense, but its appearance, its semblance, not its reality. Repetition and permanence are internal in origin; their source is the attractive or repulsive tendency, which always acts in the same direction. Passion remains alive not because it remains a habit, but because it is alive it appears to be a habit; and this appearance of habit exists only through the permanence of the cause.

2. On the contrary, incomplete passion lasts only through the permanence of a cause foreign to itself, often an auxiliary or supporting element. Is the consolidation supplied by habit a luxury or a necessity? Experience alone can answer. Let us examine cases in which habit is broken. This is the therapeutic procedure, the remedy most frequently employed by the passionate person himself or by those wishing to cure him. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it fails. Sometimes the break depends on external conditions that impose nonexercise: chronic illness, imprisonment, ruin in the gambler’s case, and so forth.

If the passion is deep, if the effort in the direction of attraction or repulsion is energetic, breaking the habit will have no effect; it rather heightens the passion, which smolders indefinitely, always ready to satisfy itself. This brings us back to the first case.

If the passion is superficial, removing the habit extinguishes it through the absence of repeated stimuli: the sight of the loved or hated object, the gaming table, wine, delicate dishes. Habit, on the contrary, sustains or consolidates it; it maintains the fixed idea. Thus Louis XV, after Damiens’s attempt on his life, wished to dismiss his mistress. Madame de Pompadour held firm, and one day the king, passing near the private staircase leading to her apartments, went up, “recaptured by habit”; the rest is known. Nothing is more frequent than these habitual passions, which would die of themselves if human agents did not maintain them from outside: thus the love of princes is sustained by favorites, their dependents, and everyone interested in perpetuating it. Change is an excellent touchstone for discovering whether a passion is superficial or deep.

3. Since habit therefore acts only on moderate passions, there is a reverse side to the coin: its encrusting power. In the long run it harms them and leads toward dormancy. As a principle of automatism, routine, and the weakening or extinction of consciousness, it tends to diminish an already languishing activity. Little by little, only an almost empty mold remains. This is the individual equivalent of social facts entirely comparable in their regressive movement toward extinction. In religions, outward observance, customs, ceremonial, and rites long survive living faith through the effect of habit. The political institutions of a monarchical state may continue for some time even though belief in the sacred character of the king, their animating principle, has disappeared.¹

It has been asked whether some passions escape satiety, and an affirmative answer has been given, with love of God, science, and art as examples. Others might have been added, notably the singular and narrow passions of collectors of every kind. In my view, this question is badly posed. A certain passion, taken in the abstract, is spoken of as inextinguishable; but every passion is individual, and none by nature is immune to exhaustion. We may certainly admit that static forms are more resistant, but they collapse like the others. Fundamentally, the question is a transposition of this one: Can a person’s character change? Passion, as we have seen, is a partial character that often tends to become the total character. In our view, true characters do not change, although moralists strive to establish the contrary. Without entering that discussion, and to remain within our subject, we must answer that a passion’s unfailing persistence comes not from its original nature, that is, its constituent elements and object, but from the original nature of the individual. There is no insatiable passion, but there are insatiably passionate people.

A related question is this: Can a passion die through a “thunderbolt”? Some authors, Letourneau and Renda, answer affirmatively, and the answer seems justified to me. Admittedly, very few examples are cited: the anecdote about Hypatia, the case of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, and that of Raymond Lull, which is really only a transformation. Some are doubtful or not very pertinent. But let us note that these concern only famous people. Nothing is said of the others because they are unknown. Yet although metamorphosis is often mistaken for extinction, we cannot reasonably doubt that such cases exist: for certain temperaments, the shock is such that the passion is killed at a blow. Thus hatred may suddenly collapse in the face of an enemy’s sudden catastrophe. No latent preparation is required for this unexpected annihilation, because any destruction can occur all at once.

Every passion that disappears can be replaced by another in two ways.

The passion dying out and the one succeeding it are different, but share a common basis: I call this case a transformation.

One passion is succeeded by another totally different in nature: I call this case a substitution.

These two cases must be studied separately.

I. It is unnecessary to point out that an ending through transformation is only an apparent ending, deceiving only common opinion and unreflective minds. For it to occur, two principal conditions are required.

1. The individual must possess a surplus of energy needing to be expended. No transformation is possible in the exhausted; the material is lacking. The moralists rightly observed that great sinners can become great saints, and that people passionate for the good might have been great criminals.

2. A goal, a directing idea, must appear. Until it does, energy may be spent on vain attempts, on sketches of passions; but until it is dammed and channeled by the power of the idea, transformation is impossible. The idea, I repeat, as a pure concept is inadequate to this role; it must embody and fix certain latent or undirected tendencies. Many ideas may arise without creating the stability of the passionate state; the creative force of the idea has its source above all in the individual’s affective nature. Here, as always, except in one case to be indicated below, the displacement and replacement of the idea is the visible sign of transformation.

Nothing is more familiar than these metamorphoses of passions which are fundamentally made of the same substance. The most frequent case is the transformation of human into divine love, or conversely. It is enough to recall the evolution occurring in many mystics. We know how disappointed love has populated cloisters, and Madame de Sévigné said of the converted Racine: “He loves God as he loved his mistresses.” The transformation of sensual into Platonic love and the contrary metamorphosis are less complete cases. We know that religious fanaticism can change into political and social fanaticism: contemporary history supplies names familiar to everyone. The passion for struggle and conquest can vary in its goal and appearances without varying in nature. Thus Ignatius of Loyola, an ardent and combative knight, impeded by his wounds, passed through a period of “ferment” and became a paladin of another order, in the service of Jesus Christ.²

In sum, in cases of transformation, the directing idea is replaced by another. This is the effect of circumstances, external influences, suggestion, and latent tendencies; but the initial passion lives on, always the same, under another mask.

One mode of transformation requires special observations: the case in which a passion changes into its opposite. Although the notion of an opposite is fairly vague and difficult to define, especially for feelings, we may content ourselves with an empirical conception and accept as opposites two passions of which one, through its characteristics and effects, seems the negation of the other. This mode of transformation has a mark exclusively its own: the intellectual state, the fixed or dominant idea, does not change. The object of the passion remains the same, except for a reversal of value; it changes sign in the mathematical sense, becoming negative instead of positive, or conversely.

The causes of this reversal are internal, a change in the passionate person’s dispositions, or external, a real change in the object, a frequent case in love, external influences, or suggestions from others; but in the final analysis they reduce directly or indirectly to a transformation in the subject.

To explain this change through antithesis, analogies have been sought in biological facts: the alternation of fatigue and rest, antagonistic actions, phenomena of contrast in the visual organ. But besides being hypothetical and arbitrary, these analogies teach us nothing, notably why the disappearing passion does not end, as it usually does, in indifference or satiety. It has been observed that affective life characteristically moves between opposites, because it is determined throughout by the great contrast between pleasure and pain. “Strong tension,” it has been said, “is often followed by a tendency to direct our interest the opposite way, just as the eye, tired of one color, seeks its opposite.” However true this thesis may be, it is too general and therefore insufficient for our particular case.

It is better to seek the explanation in purely psychic facts, insofar as their obscure mechanism can be penetrated. As a result of the causes enumerated above, the dominant idea, and consequently its object, ceases to be a center of agreeable and attractive associations. On the contrary, the value judgments concerning these objects have changed sign, become negative, become affirmations of the disagreeable and repulsive; a general feeling of aversion replaces the other feeling. It is a sum, each perception or representation awakening tendencies of the same nature, all oriented in the same direction. Gradually this aggregate of conscious or subconscious states forms a solid synthesis, a complete systematization which, slowly or rapidly and after oscillations, establishes itself irresistibly in consciousness: the transformation is accomplished. Let us note, moreover, that very complex passions, because of the sometimes heterogeneous elements composing them, have moments of weakness, retreat, and passing reversal: abortive sketches of a transformation into the contrary state.

The most frequent cases of this transformation are love into hatred, religious into irreligious fanaticism, and the passion for pleasure into asceticism. I do not use the expression “passion for pleasure” at random; for although pleasure is a general characteristic of affective life, it can become the object of a stable tendency that rules the individual, as in pleasure seekers. Its manifestations are admittedly somewhat scattered and heterogeneous; it lacks the cohesion of powerful passions. The person passionate for pleasure is closely related to the emotionally impulsive.

It is scarcely necessary to recall that in all these cases the two antithetical passions share a common basis, an identity of nature expressed by the permanence of the idea: only on this condition are they opposites.

II. In the strict sense, substitution, the replacement of one passion by another totally different in nature, is not very frequent. The question is complex and presents several aspects.

First, here is a form of substitution, or at least an evolution approaching it. A commonly accepted opinion, founded on centuries of observation of human life, holds that the dominant passion depends on age and therefore on constitution, temperament, character, and acquired experience. This is summed up by saying: nutritive passions belong to childhood; love to youth; the various forms of ambition to maturity; avarice to old age. Notice that this substitution follows a fairly regular course from the minimum to the maximum of calculation. It is an empirical generalization, deduced directly and immediately from the evidence of experience, and its conclusion undeniably favors at least partial substitution. Yet it is equally indisputable that it is true only broadly, for moderate passions, for ordinary people and the majority; in a word, it is vague.

The problem may be considered from another angle. There are people of a single passion and, more frequently, people of several coexisting or successive passions. What do the latter teach us about substitution? Little; no clear solution emerges. We know that affective life readily tolerates the coexistence of tendencies that are not only different but often opposed and contradictory, each seeking only its own end. We have studied this state elsewhere, in Logique des sentiments, showing that it is anarchic only from the standpoint of reason, which needs unity, whereas the affective being accommodates it very well. Let us therefore accept this fact without comment.

It can deceive and produce the illusory appearance of substitution. In passionate temperaments, when several tendencies coexist, each, especially during youth’s period of effervescence, tries to monopolize the individual, who spends himself on brief and dissimilar passions. But often, within this affective chaos, a true passion arises and grows, seemingly replacing all the others. Someone emerges from agitation without a fixed goal, moving in every direction, to become and remain passionately devoted to adventure and the unknown, a great explorer. We may ask whether this was Lord Byron’s case: he is classed among the passionate, although he was rather emotionally impulsive, “made of faculties unbridled and overflowing.” He who called a poet “a chatterer” and said he had taken up poetry for want of anything better may have had no real passion except adventure: he found his path by becoming a soldier of Greek independence, to die at Missolonghi. It has been maintained that Caesar was not born ambitious. For a long time frail in health, worldly, refined, a dilettante endowed with an admirable scientific and artistic intelligence, he asserted his dominant passion largely through the effect of circumstances. Take Napoleon as the type of ambition incarnate. This passion was the permanent substance of his will, so intimate that he no longer distinguished it from himself and at times “ceased to be conscious of it.”³ Yet he had dreamy passions arising from the same tendency that attracted him to J.-J. Rousseau and Ossian. One of his biographers attributes three true loves to him, omitting purely sensual fancies. But he kept these passions on a rein. “Does Joséphine not know,” he said, “that love is not made for me? What is love? A passion that sets the whole universe aside to see only the beloved object. Certainly I am not by nature disposed to surrender to such exclusion.”⁴

Bolívar, el Libertador, appears to us possessed by a single passion, the liberation of his compatriots, identified, it is true, with his personal ambition: he was accused of wishing to have himself crowned. But the English general Miller, who served under him and knew him thoroughly, tells us that in youth he was enamored of dancing, excesses at table, gambling, and obscene jokes, dragging all his mistresses with him into camp. Adversity made him another man: proud, impassive, secretive, tenacious, patient and flexible when necessary, a devoted patriot. Let us also cite Alfieri. Until twenty-seven, an unrestrained passion for travel, women, and horses, “without which he is only half himself.” Then a kind of hysterical crisis. “He then commits himself, to himself and to the public, to becoming a dramatist”; a new passion, study, possesses him until his death at fifty-two: “he killed himself through study and work.” “Abruptly,” writes one biographer, “he left the world to enter literature, as in an age of religion he would have entered a convent.” Yet this passion did not act quickly enough to kill all the others.

Facts of this kind abound in history and among people who have no history. But on closer inspection, there is no complete substitution, although the last two cases approach it. The real event is the domination of a single passion that rises far above the others, atrophies and weakens them, or enslaves them to its designs.

Ultimately, is complete substitution possible? Can one remain passionate but with a total change of orientation, with nothing in common between the two phases? To be precise, take Romeo as the ideal type of love. Suppose him saved from death, sated with his love for Juliet and with all love: could he have become an ambitious condottiere, possessed by the single passion of conquering a principality by fire and sword?

A priori, this complete substitution is possible and even highly plausible. It is difficult to find examples in history because chroniclers have no concern for precise psychological details. The same is true in ordinary life among the unknown; or, if the conditions of their metamorphosis have been noticed, they are known only to those around them. Morbid cases remain, in which objective observation is easier. Such cases occur: thus a young woman haunted by an obsession with love after a broken marriage accepts a few consoling drinks in a tavern, “which console her so well that she begins again, and instead of being obsessed with love, she becomes a dipsomaniac.”⁵ But we should add that entering pathology modifies the problem somewhat.

In sum, cases of complete substitution must be rare. True passion holds the whole person, and in the present case the person must become wholly different. Such a change is certainly not impossible. Conversions of every kind are also substitutions, but less radical ones, being simple reversals of value which, as we have seen, presuppose a common basis.

Thus, leaving aside people of a single passion and taking things in their ordinary course, in ardent, richly endowed temperaments that have risen above the lower level of the sensitive and unstable, one passion holds supremacy, while the others are accessories, auxiliaries, or antagonists.

Passion sometimes ends in madness. This fact is so familiar that merely recalling it, without examples or comment, might seem sufficient. On further reflection, however, we discover that experience offers obscure cases in which we may ask whether madness is a passion ending or passion a madness in preparation, so that what appears an ending would really be a beginning. The question deserves some detailed study, for it touches the heart of our subject, the inner nature of passion, and poses this problem: Is passion a pathological state? It is not easy to answer clearly.

We shall reduce our study to two questions: Are there characteristics distinguishing passion from madness? Do passion and madness share a common nature? These two states will thus be compared successively in their differences and their resemblances.

I. Distinguishing the healthy from the morbid is often very difficult. Certainly there are cases in which hesitation is impossible, but there are also border zones that hover undecided between illness and health. Claude Bernard ventured to write: “What is called the normal state is a pure conception of the mind, an ideal typical form, entirely freed from the thousand divergences among which the organism continually oscillates amid its alternating and intermittent functions.” If this is true of bodily health, how much more so of mental health? “The dilemma, this man is mad or he is not,” Griesinger said, “has no meaning in many cases.” Similar statements could be found in many other authors, and we know how full practical expert assessment is of perplexities and perilous decisions. The psychic organism, more complex and unstable than the physical organism, makes it still harder to establish a norm. This difficulty reaches its maximum in affective life.

The works of alienists contain a long enumeration of disorders symptomatic of madness: some general, others peculiar to a particular form of mental illness. It will suffice to recall the most important.

Physical symptoms, although the clearest and easiest to establish, offer little interest for our comparative inquiry, because while the physiology of madness is rich, that of the passions is so poor that the material characteristics differentiating madness from passion, if there are any, can be determined only vaguely. It is therefore preferable to confine ourselves to contrasts in the psychic order.

“The individual’s original or acquired failure to adapt to his conditions of existence or environment” has been proposed as the principal criterion of mental illness. The normal state implies adequate adaptation to the order of things. Our personality is a system of reactions adjusted to the surrounding physical and social world. Our psychic functions, perceiving, thinking, feeling, acting, are instruments whose natural end is utility, although they sometimes depart from it. This criterion is therefore frankly teleological, and must be so as a matter of fact. Is incorrect and incomplete adaptation also inherent in passions? There can be no doubt. Some moralists and biologists have maintained that all passions are harmful to the individual, leaving their social utility aside. This radical opinion seems inadmissible to me; for although some passionate people curse their servitude without being able to escape it, we frequently encounter others who would be very unhappy to be freed from it and who, all things considered, find more profit than loss in it. Yet we must concede, as a fact of experience and observation, that every passion, even a moderate one, distorts the normal mechanism of consciousness, whose rule is perpetual change and adaptation. Passion is teleological in its own way; it has a very definite end and tends toward it as instinct does. If it has its errors, instinct has its own as well. The passionate person often shows great skill in adapting to his goal and environment, but this adaptation is one-sided and therefore abnormal. Consequently, if flexibility in the adaptation of intelligence and action is taken as the criterion, passion approaches madness more closely than the normal state.

The fixed or merely dominant idea is another characteristic allowing comparison between passion and mental derangement. We saw in an earlier chapter that subjectively, as a purely psychic fact, the fixed idea or emotion, whether it lives in the brain of a passionate person, an inventor, or a madman, has as its sole mark that it is the exclusive center of associations, with or without obsessions; objectively, as an external, extrapsychic fact, the fixed idea is characterized by its value, by its results, which may be useful, indifferent, or harmful. But the distinction we seek lies elsewhere: every passion, even brief and moderate, implies a dominant, exclusive, stable idea. This condition is necessary; without it, we fall into the affective chaos of the unbalanced.⁶ This intellectual element, on the contrary, is not found in every form of mental derangement; some exclude it by their very nature, notably those whose symptoms include what alienists call “loss of thought” or a flow of ideas.

There is another difference that seems to me to have been overlooked, perhaps because it is purely psychological. The passionate person is always conscious of his passion, even when, like Napoleon, he identifies himself with it. The mentally deranged person, in general and except during lucid intervals, is not conscious of his delusion. Others understand their condition so little that, reversing the situation, they class reasonable people among the mad.

Finally, hallucinations, although not inherent in every form of mental derangement, are nevertheless a notable and frequent symptom. Yet I do not see that passionate people, even those with vivid imaginations, are predisposed to hallucination merely by their passion, or that they take their dreams for reality. This phenomenon belongs rather to poets, novelists, painters, and musicians.

We could easily lengthen this list of comparisons without changing the conclusion: there is no specific characteristic, that is, one always existing in passions and never in madness, always absent from madness and never from passion. In ambiguous cases, the distinction between passion and madness is established not by a single criterion but by a complex set of characteristics.

II. The resemblance between great passions and madness is so striking that it has everywhere been recognized and affirmed by language, the direct expression of popular opinion: madly in love, madness for gambling, power, money, and so forth. In antiquity, many physicians and philosophers, especially the Stoics, did the same. In the nineteenth century, the study of mental illnesses, previously rather neglected, developed and sought to establish itself scientifically. This question of resemblance arose anew; it was no longer merely mentioned in passing but treated. Lélut, Moreau de Tours, Maudsley, and many others gathered observations and proposed theories. They dwelt with pleasure in this intermediate region between reason and mental derangement, which they called the border zone or the frontiers of madness. It would be rash to claim that they clearly affirmed an identity of nature between passion and madness and, from the superficial resemblances visible to everyone, concluded without reservation that there was a fundamental resemblance. Yet they visibly inclined that way, and the famous saying “genius is a neurosis,” although applying to reason, could easily be transferred to passion. But we must observe that on the ground they preferentially occupied, the concern was rather with the unbalanced, impulsive, and hyperexcitable than with the passionate in the strict sense we intend. In any event, their studies established no distinction between these two categories, so their answer remained vaguely determined. By contrast, Renda, in his recent work,⁷ takes up the question and formally maintains an identity of nature. Since he rigorously distinguishes emotion from passion, even positing them as antithetical, his thesis admits no ambiguity. Here is its summary.

Passions are mitigated forms, equivalents, of mental disorders. Observation and analysis allow us to distinguish three groups of facts: first, passionate moments, mere surges of love, ambition, hatred, and so on, which do not last; they no more constitute a passion than an isolated attack of fear constitutes a phobia. Second, passionate mental disorders, that is, psychic disturbances taking on the appearance of an exaggerated passionate state, such as jealous madness or criminal revenge. Third, passions in the true and proper sense; they reach a degree not attained in the first case and exceeded in the second. “Taken in themselves, passions are equivalents of mental disorders. The conception implicitly contained in the theory of epileptic equivalents, associated with Samt and Lombroso, so fruitful for the understanding of many morbid facts, must extend from epilepsy to the entire pathological activity of the human mind. We know that ‘epileptic equivalents’ are profound disturbances of consciousness which, as preludes to an attack properly so called, often replace it without producing motor or vasomotor disturbances and the like. This is a reduction of the clinical picture of epilepsy to the psychic sphere, and a kind of attenuation of its phenomena. Passions are to mental disorders what psychic equivalents are to epilepsy. They are preludes or substitutes, either in the individual or in the hereditary process, of the classic morbid forms; they present attenuated forms of them and nevertheless have the same outcome” (p. 101).

It will have been noticed that Dr. Renda adduces two kinds of evidence for his thesis: passion is the equivalent of a mental disorder in the individual; it is also so in a family or lineage. This is heredity through metamorphosis or heteromorphism, a subject treated by all authors who have written on hereditary transmission.⁸

I shall not dwell on the second proof, because this form of heredity has attracted much criticism and is reproached for being too elastic an explanatory procedure. Moreover, in the present case, the formulation of the problem changes somewhat. The question is no longer a mental illness persisting over several generations but changing form as it passes from ancestor to descendant: hypochondria, melancholia, epilepsy, imbecility. It is a father’s passion hypothetically becoming insanity in the son, or conversely. Certainly facts of this kind can be produced, but we may also ask whether they are sufficiently well established and, above all, numerous enough to authorize a general conclusion. I confess that personally I incline toward the pathological thesis. Passion and madness seem to me cut from the same cloth; the difficulty is fixing the boundary. We have seen that no specific characteristic always and reliably distinguishes the passionate from the mentally deranged. No general ruling is possible, because in every generalization secondary characteristics disappear, and they are indispensable to a decision. Yet a few observations will show that complete identification is unacceptable.

It is admitted that each form of temperament predisposes to certain illnesses, inflammatory, wasting, nervous, and so forth; but this predisposition is not an illness and does not necessarily lead to one. The same applies to passions: we could find any number of greatly passionate people who did not sink into madness, and, conversely, cases of madness preceded by no passion.

Here is another difficulty. If the thesis of identity of nature is accepted in its entirety, if every passion is the mitigated equivalent of a mental disorder, we are obliged to find this equivalence and establish that a certain passion corresponds to a certain disorder, ambition to megalomania, for example. Is this possible? No classification of mental illnesses is universally accepted; every notable alienist has his own. Nor is any classification of the passions accepted by all, especially since such attempts confuse simple affective states, emotions, and passions. Yet suppose this double task accomplished, suppose it had succeeded in winning acceptance: we can safely predict that the two classifications would neither be superimposable nor coincide at every point. Anyone who doubts this need only compare any of the classifications currently in use. Among mental illnesses are states such as melancholia that have no passionate equivalent. What would be the equivalents of the diathetic insanities?

Admittedly, we can proceed with less ambition and in fragmentary fashion. In certain cases the comparison suggests itself, and various authors have made it without doctrinal preoccupations:⁹ jealousy and delusions of persecution, hatred and moral insanity, ambition and delusions of grandeur, drunkenness and alcoholism, love and erotic madness, or “a madness of exaltation without precise diagnostic boundaries,” according to Renda, p. 100. Some equivalences are more hazardous: avarice and kleptomania, the collector’s passion and, again, kleptomania, according to the same author. Yet if each of these pairs were analyzed with some care, psychic elements would be found to enter or disappear in passing from the passionate to the pathological form. The identity of nature is more marked in other cases: gambling as passion and gambling as madness; religious, political, aesthetic, or scientific passion which, heightened to the point of delusion, ends in an asylum. In sum, when we pass from passion in its intense forms to madness, we have the impression of not changing environments; but this is an impression rather than a positive, experimental certainty.

Without dwelling longer on this point, let us finally confine ourselves to this single question: Is every passion morbid by nature? The only suitable procedure, not to resolve the question but at least to clarify it, is to examine the value of passion as a biological fact. Today people are fairly willing to admit that the various forms of psychic life are instruments adapted less to speculation than to practical ends; they are weapons for the struggle, useful or harmful according to the case. Perception, judgment, reasoning, instincts, tendencies, will, and action have above all a practical value for our contact with the world and must be judged by this standard; their speculative value is a luxury.

Let us consider passion from the same standpoint. Is it a useful instrument for the individual’s life? First, observe that a person without passion, and such people exist, is not necessarily inert and without drive, as might be hastily supposed. Like anyone else, he is equipped with the appetites, instincts, tendencies, desires, and aversions belonging to humanity’s normal constitution: these are amply sufficient to make him act. Neither the emotional person’s explosive activity nor the passionate person’s violent and firm tension is necessary. Recall also that passion is not a primary and simple manifestation, a gift of nature; it is a frequently frivolous human creation. Is this complex form of affective life, whose elements we analyzed above, a gain for the individual?¹⁰ Is he better armed? Some authors deny it, even without judging as moralists. The question is not simple, and the answer depends on one’s conception of life.

If we value life as a spendthrift does, if by living well we mean living much, that is, accumulating within a given time a very large number not of pure ideas but of affective impressions, we shall attribute a positive biological value to passion.

If, on the contrary, we value life as an economist does, we shall decide that passion is wasted strength, a debilitating expenditure, and attribute a negative biological value to it.

If, leaving aside these two contrary assertions, which like all value judgments are subjective, we attempt an external, objective assessment according to results rather than the individual’s inner feeling, we shall incline rather toward the negative solution. Every passion, even brief, is a rupture in normal life. We know its distinguishing signs: the formation of a partial character, associations and dissociations governed by a single idea in a single direction, polarization of consciousness. It is an abnormal if not pathological state, an excrescence, a parasitism.

To conclude, slight passions are simple predispositions; moderate ones accentuate the pathological mark; great ones are morbid and approach madness when they do not end in it. Since, besides the two extremes, every possible transitional degree can be observed in fact, it is equally legitimate to maintain that passion is madness and that it is not. There is no absolute answer.

A final ending of passion is death. It goes without saying that this means not natural death resulting from illness, accident, or old age, but death as the effect of passion itself, arising from it through an inevitable internal logic. The passionate person can reach the fatal outcome in two ways.

Through the intrinsic fact of the passion alone, he advances toward a death he knows to be very possible, very probable, without concern to avoid it: the excesses of the glutton, the drunkard, the lover; the overwork of the artist or scholar; the blind obstinacy of the ambitious person, which weakens the calculating mind.

Through the same cause, but additionally under the pressure of external influences or circumstances, the passionate person advances toward certain death, voluntarily and deliberately. Suicide is the typical case; so is hatred satisfying itself through revenge with advance acceptance of a capital sentence.

One general observation must be added. When speaking of passions, people are ordinarily so accustomed to thinking only of two or three, the most common and dramatic, that it is worth recalling what experience of human life amply demonstrates: all passions without exception can lead to death. A very brief review of the facts supplies the proof. I say nothing of the lower-order nutritive passions mentioned above.

There is no need to dwell on love. Among suicides as a whole, men outnumber women by four or five to one; in suicides for love the numbers are approximately equal between the sexes, with a slight increase on the women’s side. This fact may be explained by the frequency of double suicide among lovers. This ending is distinctive not because of their union in death, the effect of an identical attachment and sometimes reciprocal suggestion, but because of the psychological atmosphere surrounding it. First, an imaginative illusion: the lovers wish to rest together in the same grave, as though there they might find assurance of complete, definitive, and unchanging possession. To this end they employ every means in their power, or, failing anything better, solemn appeals to their parents. Then there is calm. Once their resolution is taken, they feel happy, perhaps because this mutual consent is the highest proof of their love. “The many judicial documents I have consulted and the personal inquiries I have made establish that lovers generally prepare their double suicide with surprising unconcern and gaiety.”¹¹ Thus their desire, without ceasing to be a violent passion, takes on the appearance of a firmly established will.

Nor is there any need to dwell on ambition, the passion for power in all its forms. It scarcely falls short of love; history supplies millions of proofs, at least before the present era, for nowadays, except during revolutions, ambition rarely causes death. Recall the Roman Empire and, above all, the Byzantine Empire: of 109 imperial figures, only 34 died naturally. Was there ever a shortage of candidates? The most bloodthirsty tyrants have always found ambitious people to serve them, Henry VIII with his wives and ministers, for example, almost certain to perish violently.

All passions whose essence is love of risk and chance, the search for an unknown all the more attractive for being vague, those of the gambler, adventurer, and explorer, must resign themselves in advance to the possibility of ending in death.

The same applies to hatred and jealousy. At their extreme degree, they express themselves in the familiar imprecation: Let me die, provided he dies!¹²

Finally, we know that some misers would rather die than diminish their treasure.

A final group of a special nature remains: the patriotism of the soldier or of the Roman general voluntarily practicing devotio to secure the enemy’s defeat; religious or political passions in the passive form of martyrs who prefer execution to apostasy, or the active form of apostles and missionaries who brave death or even seek it. These, however, may provoke an objection: we call them passions; would it not be more accurate to call them beliefs? Certainly this devotion unto death is the effect of faith; but does it not also have all the characteristics we have attributed to passion, including the fixed idea, and is it not as passion that this faith is so effective? Yet a difference exists that everyone instinctively feels: all passions in this group have an impersonal and imperative character, in the moral sense, lacking in the others. Accordingly, they are most often collective; they unite similarly passionate people instead of separating them. Outside this group, on the contrary, passions are strictly individual and have no tendency to find expression in other people except through imitation. The idea underlying these passion-beliefs is general or capable of generalization, very different in this respect from the fixed idea of the lover, gambler, ambitious person, jealous person, or miser.

This ending of passion through death, which belongs to the greatly passionate, measures its power and also offers the curious spectacle of a struggle between two very energetic instincts. On one side are the instinct of self-preservation, fear of death, the will to live which, in Schopenhauer’s phrase, is present in its entirety in every animal, even the smallest, and reacts with all its power. On the other is passion which, through its invincible violence and direction toward a single goal, may without error be assimilated to an instinct. Why does passion remain victorious? We may say that the instinct of self-preservation is not equally strong in everyone; there are innate weaknesses, and others acquired through circumstances, such as incurable illness or grief, or through reflection. But despite these eclipses, the true reason lies elsewhere.

On examining the case more closely, we see that fundamentally there is no struggle. Real at the beginning, it later becomes only an appearance, an illusion of consciousness. The greatly passionate person is wholly seized by his passion; he is his passion. For him, to lose it is to cease to exist, unless he can succeed in expelling it all at once and returning to normal equilibrium, which would differ little from a miracle. The instinct of self-preservation and the passion are identified with one another and become one. This situation, in which the tendency to persevere in being must lead to nonbeing, is logically contradictory and practically pathological. Passionate people of this kind die for psychological reasons, as the rest of humanity dies for physiological ones.¹³

Human consciousness works in two ways: sometimes dispersed, made up of varied, numerous states, associated or interrupted, which is its normal form; sometimes condensed, concentrated, simplified, which is the exception. This unification of consciousness occurs chiefly in the following cases: sustained attention, the work of invention, firm voluntary determination carried into effect, and passion. Consciousness thus adapts itself wholly to knowing, creating, acting, enjoying, or suffering. This simplification and permanence are, moreover, only relative; for absolute immobility, without moments of interruption, would suppress consciousness, which lives only through changes, or transform it into a frankly morbid state.

Passion is therefore the affective equivalent of stable attention and will. Great passions mark the highest point of affective life: its maximum of energy, intensity, and permanence; its undisputed mastery within the individual, expressed outwardly through the irresistible power of its effects. Such a state cannot be frequent. On reflection, we see that the greatly passionate are no more common than people distinguished by their actions or creations, and that there is no paradox in maintaining that geniuses of passion, if I may use the term, stand on the same level as intellectual geniuses for pure psychology. Several causes conceal this parity.

First, common opinion wrongly fails to exclude emotions and impulses which, being only abortive forms or sketches of passion, can neither give its measure nor serve as terms of comparison.

Moreover, in most people, passion, with its distinctive characteristics, scarcely rises above a reasonable average, making it comparable to merely respectable intellectual talents. For the majority, it is less still: the mass of humanity abounds in mediocre passions, without strength, duration, or reach. Great passions are rare because the conditions, power and constancy, are most often lacking.

Finally, and this is crucial, let us not forget that passion is a compound of affective, motor, and intellectual elements, and that its importance is a function of these three factors. With mediocre intelligence, the thrust of instincts and desires, however violent, is capable neither of development nor of invention nor of multiple adaptations; consequently, passion is deprived of what gives outward influence, radiation, and resonance. An unknown love leading to madness, suicide, or crime may be as great in affective value as Cesare Borgia’s ambition or Robespierre’s fanaticism; but through intellectual deficiency it remains without social importance, fit at most to furnish local conversation or the chronicle of a newspaper without readers. Alone and poor in ideas, passion does not confer immortality. When examples of the greatly passionate are wanted, they are always drawn from political or religious history, military or maritime expeditions; artists or inventors intoxicated with their vocation are cited. This must be so, because these alone are known. They have left a name because they acted upon their environment; their passion had a strong and lasting effect on their fellows. Yet thousands of people have lived possessed by equally intense passions, known only to a narrow circle because they could not rise without intellectual support, or because their passion, like that of lovers, was confined to two individuals whose fate was indifferent to the rest of humanity. Nevertheless, this passion, which furnished only local conversations or obscure newspapers, was no less powerful as effort and as a condensation of affective life. “The will [that is, effort],” Schopenhauer said, “is present in its entirety in the smallest animal, which continually asserts its desire to live: the feeblest insect wills [desires] what it wills as fully as a human being.” This observation applies to the greatly passionate; however unknown they may be, passion is present in them in its entirety. For the psychologist, the greatly passionate are heroes in their own way, fascinated and possessed by their ideal, carried by it as far as death. This is why great passions compel human admiration like the great forces of nature.¹

This compelling movement of the individual, which is an affirmation in the form not of an intellectual judgment but of an act, gives most passions the character of faith. It has rightly been maintained that what explains the strength of belief in the true believer is that it comes from within and is, at least in part, his creation. This assent of the mind insofar as it feels, prefers, and acts, rather than thinks or reasons, is the common basis of belief and passion.

In the preceding analyses, in chapter III, we saw that various passions are frequently called faith, especially those collective by nature: religious, political, and moral passion, patriotism, and so forth. Great passions, like firm beliefs, have an imperative character; passionate people proclaim it loudly and invoke it as a justification, and novelists have adopted this justification of the “rights” of passion for themselves. Blind and inaccessible to reasoning as long as the affective disposition remains the same, faith and passion, as soon as they show any hesitation and allow doubt to touch them, reveal by that fact alone a nascent orientation of desire in another direction, and the situation becomes perilous.

Yet despite this identity of character, we should not generalize too far; for if we examine one by one the simple or complex passions whose genealogy we attempted above, we shall be forced to acknowledge that not all imply faith, and that a small group forms an exception.

The first group includes positive passions whose basis is an expansive movement, an aspiration toward an ideal whose possession appears supremely desirable: love, ambition, avarice, gambling, religious or political passion in the form of an apostolate, and so forth. This enumeration is incomplete, but it suffices to show that these passions are the most numerous and that the passionate people in this group are believers.

The second includes negative passions whose essential basis is a movement of repulsion or a tendency toward destruction: hatred, jealousy, religious or political passion exercised through persecution. This is a painful, distressing, anguished state in which the normal person cannot take pleasure. Accordingly, passionate people in this group wish only for deliverance; they stand at the opposite pole from the believer.

In closing this study, whose purpose was to establish the distinctive characteristics of passion and its right to a place of its own in the psychology of feeling, let me summarize its essential thesis in a few lines.

At the origin and foundation of the whole of affective life, we placed needs, appetites, and tendencies in their physiological form or enveloped in the subconscious.

At a higher level, without changing their nature but with the addition of consciousness, they are desires or repulsions. They constitute the whole of our affective life in its normal form and in the normal individual. Through their reactions, they express our physical and mental constitution. They briefly occupy the field of consciousness, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing as external or internal conditions dictate. They correspond to the succession of perceptions, images, memories, trains of reasoning, or ideas that make up the ordinary course of our intellectual life.

Against this dull and somewhat monotonous background, an unforeseen event brings forth emotion: a sudden, passing disturbance of equilibrium. The primary emotions are few, and contemporary psychologists agree fairly well on which they are. They have a pre-established physical mechanism that can be determined by observation; they are the work of nature.

Passion is more complex, develops later, and thus occupies a higher place in the life of the mind. It stands opposed to emotion as the stable to the unstable; despite its permanence, it undergoes secondary variations that emotion does not. The passions, great and small, are countless, and vary with individuals, social conditions, and historical periods.

Finally, let us note another opposition. Evolutionary psychology maintains that ‘what distinguishes one emotion from other emotions is originally due to the different reactions aroused by events. These reactions are in turn determined by circumstances that may reach back into the distant prehistoric past; but to succeed, they have always required special forms of coordination. Only in this way could they have been useful and tended to become organically established through heredity. Every emotional reaction is therefore the survival of acts that were originally beneficial.’ Whether we accept this explanation as fact or as hypothesis, it remains true that emotion, in the strict sense, belongs more to the species than to the individual.

Passion, by contrast, because it is a form of character, marks the individual more than the species. As for its usefulness in the struggle for life, that is, as we have seen, highly questionable. Its individual character is also the work of a form of imagination peculiar to the person truly governed by passion, an imagination that is chiefly affective. Because it endures, passion lives not only in the present, as emotion does, but also in the past and the future. It feeds on memories that cannot be dry representations, but are drawn from the memory of feelings. We have shown that real and profound passions are built from images of this kind and are thus, to a considerable extent, the work not of nature but of human beings.