82 Heredity. 



The Physiology and Pathology of Mind, says 'the admirable 

 explanation of the passions given by Spinoza has never been 

 surpassed, and certainly it will not be easy to surpass it.' 



As the author of the Ethics profoundly observes, the ultimate 

 explanation of all sensible phenomena is found in the fact of desire, 

 ' desire meaning appetite with self-consciousness,' and appetite 

 being * the very essence of man, in so far as it is directed to acts 

 which tend towards his conservation.' Desire is the physical and 

 moral constitution of man, inasmuch as it strives towards being 

 and well-being, towards existence and development. It has its 

 ultimate root in the region of the unconscious ; nor do we know 

 how it becomes conscious, under that form of tendency which 

 characterizes it. Desire is, like thought, one of the forms of the 

 unknowable : it is the unknown quantity, the x which serves to 

 explain for us all phenomena of the affections. We may, indeed, 

 reduce the endless variety of passions, emotions, and sentiments to 

 two very broad states, viz. pleasure and pain that is to say, an 

 augmentation or diminution of being but the cause of the two 

 states is desire. It is just because there are in us tendencies that 

 may be satisfied or opposed, that we feel pleasure or pain. In 

 fact, when we experience pleasure or pain, we wish to preserve 

 the one and to destroy the other; but this conscious desire, 

 sometimes regarded as the effect of the primitive unconscious 

 desire, is, in reality, only a continuation of it. That state of 

 tension which we call desire, and which lasts as long as we live, 

 is modified each instant and hence our joys and our sorrows ; 

 these are but moments of a continuous process, and desire is, 

 as it were, the woof on which the chances of life embroider all our 

 emotions. 



In sensibility everything tends first of all and directly towards 

 ourselves ; later and indirectly towards others. ' The love of self 

 is the root of all the passions ; it is the supreme law of sensibility, 

 the nature of which is to look only to its own good.' We love 

 only ourselves ; or, in others, that which is like ourselves. Our 

 sympathetic tendencies, manifold and strong though they be, are 

 derived from, and may be ultimately reduced to, love of self 

 without egotism. Sympathy being, in its genuine sense, 'the 

 tendency of one individual to fall in with the emotional or active 



